Strategic Operations 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. This role sits on a new team within USRO focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, or fast-moving areas of work. The team helps define what needs to be built, creates the operating model to support it, and works with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time. As a Strategic Operations Lead, you will focus on large, cross-functional initiatives that require clear thinking, technical fluency, strong execution, and the ability to bring structure to undefined problems. We are seeking a Strategic Operations Lead to drive new and existing strategic operating builds across User Safety & Risk Operations. This is a senior IC role for someone who can turn broad, undefined priorities into clear operating models, launch plans, requirements, stakeholder alignment, documentation, reporting, and execution rhythms. This role will often support initiatives where OpenAI is developing new products or partnerships and the operating model is still being defined. These programs have a direct user safety and risk nexus because new deployment models can change what signals OpenAI can see, who owns response decisions, and how user-impacting risks are detected, escalated, and resolved. You will clarify what OpenAI owns, what partner teams own, what signals we can reliably monitor, how issues should be escalated, and how the workflow should evolve from launch support into a durable operating model. The right person is highly strategic and deeply practical. They can move from executive-level framing to detailed workflow design, stakeholder management, SOPs, launch readiness, risk tracking, and implementation. They are technically comfortable, AI-fluent, analytically strong, and able to coordinate effectively across Product, Engineering, Legal, Policy, Support, Partnerships, and Operations, including external stakeholders. Location: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office. In This Role, You Will: Lead strategic operational builds from ambiguous problem statement to implemented operating model, including scope, owners, workflows, milestones, risks, and success measures. Build launch and early-life operating models for complex partner deployments, including monitoring cadence, escalation paths, ownership maps, reporting expectations, and follow-up mechanisms. Translate technical, policy, safety, privacy, and operational constraints into practical workflows that teams can execute. Define how safety and risk signals should be monitored, reviewed, packaged, escalated, and tracked through resolution. Partner with senior leaders across USRO and cross-functional teams to translate business, product, safety, and operational needs into clear execution plans. Use data and operational signals to understand workflow health, capacity needs, bottlenecks, quality gaps, and risks. Identify where AI tools, automation, lightweight systems, or better workflows can reduce operational burden and improve consistency. Keep operating models current as data pipelines, tooling, dashboards, partner processes, and ownership mature. You Might Thrive in This Role If You 8+ years of experience in operations, strategy and operations, product operations, technical program management, trust and safety operations, risk operations, implementation or management consulting, or a related field. Track record of leading complex, ambiguous work from problem framing through execution. Strong technical fluency, including the ability to reason through data flows, system ownership, logs, dashboards, tooling gaps, and failure modes. Strong data literacy, including experience using SQL, spreadsheets, dashboards, and metrics to analyze workflows, assess risk, identify gaps, and drive decision making. Comfortable operating where data access, tooling, ownership, or policy thresholds are incomplete or changing. Able to work closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and technical operations teams; ask the right questions; and translate technical constraints into operational requirements. Pragmatic about sequencing: knows what must be ready for launch, what can be monitored before action is taken, and what needs to become durable over time. AI-fluent, with a track record of using AI tools to move faster, improve quality, or create operational leverage. Strong interpersonal judgment, with the ability to build trust across teams while keeping ownership, accountability, and escalation paths clear. Implementation-oriented and comfortable building the workflow, not just defining the strategy. Able to operate at a fast pace while staying organized, cal