Applied Risk Standards Specialist

About the Team

OpenAI's Global Affairs team builds authentic, collaborative relationships with public officials and the broader AI policymaking community to inform and support shared work in these domains.

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.

In this role, you will

• Lead the development of applied AI risk standards, including 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.
• 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.