Applied Risk Standards Specialist
About the Team
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires effective engagement with public policy stakeholders and the broader community impacted by AI. Accordingly, our Global Affairs team builds authentic, collaborative relationships with public officials and the broader AI policymaking community to inform and support our shared work in these domains. We ensure that insights from policymakers inform our work and – in collaboration with our colleagues and external stakeholders – seek to shape policy so that it aligns with and supports our mission.
About the role
OpenAI is looking for an Applied Risk Standards Specialist to lead standards work for applied risk in applications, including mental health, youth safety, age assurance, functional efficacy, reliability, and privacy-related risks. You will help turn internal research, safety policies, and evaluation methods into technically sound, measurable, and adaptable standards that build public trust and support responsible deployment.
This role sits within our AI standards and global assurance function in Global Affairs. Working closely with Safety Systems, Research, Product, Model Policy, Legal, and third-party evaluators, you will author proposals, negotiate requirements, and represent OpenAI in priority standards bodies. You will take on the drafting and external engagement needed to advance this work, enabling technical experts to focus on the underlying methods and evidence. You will also bring emerging requirements back into internal planning before they become established expectations.
Alongside this primary portfolio, you will support the AI Standards and Global Assurance Lead on frontier AI assurance, contributing to risk-management standards, evaluation and benchmarking requirements, and approaches to independent assessment.
The role connects technical practice with external standards. It does not replace the teams responsible for evaluation methods, safety decisions, controls, internal compliance, or implementation. You will own standards drafting, review coordination, negotiation, and assessment-design contributions within an agreed mandate.
In this role, you will
- Lead the development of applied AI risk standards. This includes working with technical and policy teams to define and advance standards for mental health, youth safety, age assurance, efficacy, reliability, and privacy-related risks, with a particular focus on evaluations and assessments.
- Work with technical owners to turn research, internal policies, and evaluation methods into credible test methods, assessment criteria, and standards grounded in real system behavior.
- Bring emerging requirements into internal planning and work with responsible teams to clarify their implications for evaluations, controls, and assurance for our products.
- Work with technical and GRC partners on assessor competence, independence, conflicts of interest, evidence access, reporting, and the distinction between management-system audits and technical evaluations.
- Contribute drafting, representation, and coordination on frontier risk-management and independent-assessment standards.
- Lead assigned standards-body workstreams, negotiate proposals, and coordinate internal input, reducing the external engagement burden on technical experts. Contribute to relevant ISO/IEC, INCITS, NIST consortium, and cross-industry work.
- Maintain clear approvals, negotiating positions, contribution records, and implementation handoffs so that external commitments remain connected to technical owners and available capacity.
You might thrive in this role if you
- Have technical depth in evaluation science, AI evaluations and red teaming, AI safety, or trust and safety, combined with demonstrated ability to translate that expertise into credible standards or assessment methods.
- Have authored or materially shaped standards, evaluation criteria, control frameworks, or normative technical contributions—not only coordinated participation.
- Can translate a broad safety objective into a clear requirement and explain what evidence would demonstrate that it has been met.
- Understand the differences among organizational risk-management processes, model and system evaluations, mitigation testing, and broader assurance claims.
- Can evaluate sensitive, context-dependent outcomes, including uncertainty and variation across users and use cases, without overstating what a benchmark or assessment can establish. You do not need to be an expert in every risk domain.
- Understand how assessor competence, independence, incentives, and access affect the credibility of an assessment.
- Can build consensus without sacrificing technical rigor, and know when to compromise, challenge a proposal, or escalate a decision.
- Earn trust with technical teams while communicating clearly with lawyers, executives, policymakers, and external standards participants.
- Write precisely, exercise discretion, and can independently move a defined workstream from initial proposal through review, negotiation, and handoff.