Analytics & Automation Lead, User Safety & Risk Operations

About the role

At OpenAI, our User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real-world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems. The Analytics & Automation team helps USRO operate more effectively and scale safely. The team builds automation, analytics, reporting, monitoring, and quality systems that improve how work is prioritized, reviewed, measured, and managed across the organization's portfolio. Our work includes workflow automation, operational health dashboards, queue and case analysis, quality measurement, classifier and evaluation feedback loops, alerting, reporting infrastructure, and decision-support tools. We partner closely with operational teams as well as Product, Engineering, Product Policy, Safety, and Support to identify high-leverage opportunities and build practical systems that improve outcomes. We are seeking an Analytics & Automation Lead to manage and grow a senior technical operations team responsible for building the analytics, automation, and quality systems that help User Safety and Risk Operations scale. This is a hands-on leadership role for a mission-oriented systems thinker: someone who can translate messy operational problems into practical, measurable solutions; guide senior technical and analytical ICs (Independent Contributors); prioritize across competing needs;, and build durable infrastructure and reusable capabilities that improve the performance of multiple operational teams. You will lead work across workflow automation, operational health analytics, quality and evaluation systems, emerging-risk signal infrastructure, dashboards and reporting, and data flywheel feedback loops.You will help determine where automation can meaningfully improve speed, consistency, and scalability, and where human judgment and strong quality controls must remain central. The right person is highly technical for an operations role, deeply comfortable with ambiguity, and fluent in using AI tools to improve real workflows. Success in this role means building systems that make safety operations faster, more reliable, more measurable, and more scalable without losing the human judgment required for sensitive user-safety decisions. Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office. Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning content. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential. In This Role, You Will Lead and develop a senior team of technical and analytical ICs responsible for automation, analytics, reporting, and other systems. Set the strategy and operating cadence for a horizontal team supporting safety and risk operations across multiple workflows and domains. Prioritize a portfolio of high-impact opportunities, making clear tradeoffs based on user impact, risk reduction, operational need, technical feasibility, and scalability. Build systems that improve operational health and visibility, including data infrastructure, dashboards, SLA and backlog monitoring, and quality measurement. Design and implement workflow improvements such as automated triage, routing, prioritization, signal enrichment, case clustering, review assistance, and reporting automation. Build and improve the systems and strategies for emerging risk identification, analysis, and signal sharing Identify where AI, LLMs, classifiers, or lightweight tooling can materially improve operational work, while designing appropriate evaluation, monitoring, human review, and fallback paths. Establish measurement and quality frameworks for operational systems, including golden sets, sampling strategies, reviewer calibration, false-positive and false-negative monitoring, and system-health metrics. Partner with operational leaders to understand their workflows, identify root causes and bottlenecks, and turn high-value needs into scalable systems rather than one-off analyses. Collaborate with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, Safety, Support, and other partner teams to translate user and operational insights into better tools, processes, and outcomes. Raise the bar for technical judgment, written communication, prioritization, and execution across a senior, independent team. You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have 12+ years of relevant experience across trust and safety, risk operations, data, analytics, automation, product operations, integrity, fraud, or similarly high-stakes operational environments. Have 4+ years of people management experience, including experience leading senior technical, analytical, or highly independent ICs. Are highly technical for an operations leader: comfortable with SQL, dashboards, data quality, classifier/eval concepts, automation design, and practical AI tooling. Experience work