Software Engineer, Safety White Hat

About the Team

The Integrity White Hat team is responsible for proactively uncovering failure modes in OpenAI’s most advanced models, products and runtime systems before they reach the world. This small, high-impact group partners closely with research, safety teams and security to probe vulnerabilities, surface early warning signs of misalignment, and ensure that our models meet the highest standards of safety.

About the Role

You will be a founding member of the team and help shape the strategy and vision for how we ensure fast and safe deployment of more powerful models and product experiences. You’ll define the scope and methodology of adversarial evaluations, drive alignment between model development and safety, and ensure OpenAI remains at the forefront of proactive risk mitigation.

We’re looking for someone who thrives at the intersection of research and safety, operate with high integrity and urgency, and are motivated by the mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

In this role, you will:

• Define the strategic direction and methodology for adversarial testing—including empirical probing, stress-testing, and alignment-focused evaluations.

• Identify and characterize emergent risks in reasoning, instruction-following, agentic behavior, and other critical capabilities before they result in external incidents.

• Collaborate with external partners to extend the reach and rigor of the White Hat efforts.

• Operate with a lean and efficient structure, balancing in-house expertise with vendor support where appropriate.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a proven track record of leading White Hat initiatives for frontier models or complex AI systems.

• Bring deep familiarity with LLM behavior, post-training evaluation techniques, and AI safety research.

• Are highly attuned to failure modes in AI systems—e.g., sycophancy, jailbreaking, and harmful outputs—and can surface these before production.

• Prefer working in close proximity to research teams rather than commercial or sales-focused environments.

• Have experience building and scaling high-trust, high-performance technical teams.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$255K – $405K + Offers Equity