Strategic Operations Lead

About

OpenAI's User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team protects 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 system improvements. This role is on a new team within USRO focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, or fast-moving areas of work, defining what needs to be built, creating the operating model, and working with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable.

About the Role

We are seeking a Strategic Operations Lead to drive new and existing strategic operating builds across User Safety & Risk Operations. This senior individual contributor role requires 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 ideal candidate is highly strategic and deeply practical, able to 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. This is a hybrid role, 3 days/week in-office in San Francisco, CA.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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, calm, and effective in high-ambiguity environments.
• Tool-agnostic and resourceful, with a track record of quickly learning unfamiliar systems and building effective solutions with limited resources, including lightweight tools, AI-assisted workflows, dashboards, documentation, and process design.
• Experience supporting cloud, enterprise, infrastructure, platform, or partner-hosted deployments is a plus.
• Experience building launch-readiness or post-launch monitoring processes for complex technical programs is a plus.
• Experience designing workflows that include escalation paths, QA, capacity planning, reporting, and long-term ownership transitions is a plus.
• Experience in implementation-focused consulting, product operations, technical program management, or strategy and operations roles where success depended on execution, not only planning is a plus.
• Experience prototyping lightweight tools, automations, dashboards, or workflow improvements using AI-assisted development tools such as Codex, low-code/no-code platforms, SQL, spreadsheets, or scripting is a plus.