OpenAI Senior role on OpenAI's Model Policy team to develop policies addressing biological and chemical risks in AI systems. Design structured taxonomies and operationalize policy for safe model behavior.
Responsibilities
Providing access to frontier AI systems raises complex questions around dual-use science and catastrophic risk. How should models respond to requests involving chemical synthesis, biological experimentation, or pathogen research? Where is the boundary between legitimate scientific inquiry and information that could enable misuse? How do we design policies that meaningfully reduce risk without unnecessarily restricting beneficial research?
This is a senior role in which you’ll help shape policy creation and development at OpenAI for addressing biological and chemical risks. You will develop structured policy frameworks and taxonomies to guide safe model behavior. This role sits at the intersection of biosecurity expertise, AI safety research, and policy design. You will help ensure that frontier AI systems can support beneficial life sciences research, such as drug discovery, public health, and biosafety, while reducing the risk that these capabilities could be misused.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
Design and maintain model policies governing chemical and biological risk, defining how models should safely handle dual-use scenarios.
Develop structured taxonomies of chemical and biological risk that inform model training data, evaluation benchmarks, and safety monitoring systems.
Translate biosecurity and chemical security expertise into actionable model behavior, working closely with research and engineering teams to operationalize policy in training and evaluation pipelines.
Develop a broad range of subject matter expertise while maintaining agility across topics.
Identify emerging risk vectors where frontier AI capabilities could meaningfully lower barriers to harmful activity and develop mitigation strategies.
Engage with internal and external subject-matter experts in biosecurity, biodefense, and chemical safety to ensure policies reflect real-world risk landscapes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong domain expertise in chemistry, biology, biosecurity, or related fields and are motivated to translate that expertise into principled, operational policies that scale to Frontier AI systems.
Have experience researching LLMs, ML, AI, tech policy, moral reasoning, and/or enjoy classification problems.
Qualification
Strong domain expertise in chemistryExperience researching LLMs
Preferred
Strong domain expertise in chemistry, biology, biosecurity, or related fields
