Technical Abuse Investigator - CBRN at OpenAI San Francisco, CA

Technical Abuse Investigator - CBRN job  Francisco, CA.

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products – especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products.

As a technical abuse investigator on the Intelligence and Investigations team, you will be responsible for detecting misuse of our platform or services. Specifically, you will focus on cases where users attempt to use our platform in connection with prohibited activities such as developing or delivering biological and/or chemical threats to harm people, critical resources/infrastructure, or the environment. OpenAI has strict prohibitions and policies in this area, and you will detect, disrupt, and enforce on actors who violate our policies.

This role requires domain-specific expertise, experience investigating sophisticated threats, and the ability to navigate ambiguous signals in a complex and adversarial threat environment.

You will respond to time-sensitive escalations and will be expected to present your investigative work, both in writing and verbally, to key stakeholders across government, industry, and civil society, when required. You will also help inform the company’s evolving threat response and integrity monitoring and mitigation stack, while working closely on individual cases and enforcement assessments.

This role is remote-friendly, though you’re welcome to work from our San Francisco office if desired. The role includes participation in an on-call rotation that will involve resolving urgent escalations outside of normal work hours. Some investigations may involve sensitive content.

• Detect, investigate, and disrupt the attempted misuse of OpenAI products for the development or dissemination of biological threats, including dual-use misuse and emerging biothreat vectors. You may also be expected to coordinate across related domains (e.g., chemical threats).

• Partner closely with teams across Policy, Legal, Integrity, Global Affairs, and Security to conduct robust investigations, including cross-internet and open-source research to trace and understand abuse and ensure OpenAI’s mitigations address evolving needs in the space.

• Develop abuse signals and tracking strategies to proactively detect users attempting dual-use or biohazard-related misuse of our platform and review content for enforcement decisions.

• Communicate findings from your investigations with internal stakeholders and, at times, external partners including regulatory or scientific organizations.

• Develop a categorical understanding of our product surfaces in the biosecurity space, and work with engineering teams to improve data visibility and internal tooling.

• Brief company leadership, and key external stakeholders on your work.

This role requires U.S. government security clearance. To comply with this requirement, applicants for this position must be U.S. citizens.

• Have industry-leading experience in biosecurity, biological weapons non-proliferation, dual-use research of concern (DURC), or related biodefense fields,

• Have strong familiarity with technical investigations, especially using SQL and Python, in a government/military and/or tech company

• Have demonstrated experience in risk-mitigation (e.g., adversarial thinking and record of success in threat mitigation)

• Have worked on investigations related to biological threat actors, malicious dual-use exploitation, or responsible innovation in synthetic biology or bioengineering

• Have at least 5+ years of experience tracking misuse and/or abuse in biosecurity or life sciences domains, or equivalent education in these domains

• Have at least 2 years of experience developing innovative detection solutions and conducting open-ended research to solve real-world problems

• Experience in presenting analytical work in public or policy settings

• Have experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that…