OpenAI is actively recruiting a Head of Preparedness for its Safety Systems team, offering a competitive compensation package of up to $555,000 plus equity. The senior role, based in San Francisco, highlights the company’s intensified focus on evaluating and mitigating risks from increasingly advanced AI models. The position involves owning the end-to-end Preparedness programme, which is crucial to OpenAI’s safety strategy, designed to anticipate and address potential catastrophic harms from frontier AI capabilities.
Core responsibilities as Head of Preparedness
The Head of Preparedness will drive the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI’s Preparedness framework. Some of the key responsibilities include:
– Building and coordinating precise, robust, and scalable capability evaluations for advanced models.
– Developing detailed threat models across multiple risk domains.
– Overseeing mitigations to create an operational safety pipeline.
– Ensuring evaluation results directly inform critical decisions on model launches, internal policies, and formal safety cases.
– Refining the framework in response to emerging risks, new capabilities, or evolving external expectations.
– Leading a small, high-impact team while collaborating extensively with research, engineering, product, governance, policy, enforcement teams, and external partners.
The role demands clear communication and strong technical judgment, especially for high-stakes decisions in uncertain environments.
What OpenAI is seeking in candidates for this role
Ideal candidates must possess deep technical expertise in machine learning, AI safety, evaluations, security, or related risk areas. Additional advantages include experience in high-rigour evaluations, threat modeling, cybersecurity, biosecurity, or other frontier-risk domains.
OpenAI’s Preparedness team plays a vital role in proactively tracking catastrophic risks as models scale in capability. Rather than reactive measures post-deployment, the framework emphasises structured evaluations, threat modeling, and cross-functional safeguards to ensure safety evolves alongside technical progress. Interested applicants can apply through OpenAI’s careers page, as the company continues to expand its safety infrastructure amid rapid advancements in artificial intelligence.
This hiring push reflects broader industry concerns about managing risks from powerful AI systems, with OpenAI positioning preparedness as essential for responsible development and real-world deployment.
