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OpenAI is building an in-house social science research function that studies its own product's effects on well-being, learning, and trust using its production data, signaling that it expects to be judged on measured societal impact and wants that evidence to shape product and policy decisions.
About the Team
The Product Policy team develops and implements policies that shape how OpenAI’s technology is built and used. We work with teams across the company to turn complex questions about AI’s benefits and risks into practical guidance for responsible research, product development, and deployment.
About the Role
We are hiring a senior applied scientist to study how AI affects people and society using OpenAI production data, experiments, and social science methods. This role sits at the intersection of applied social science, AI, and product policy. The scientist will own research from an ambiguous question through study design, data collection and analysis, methodological validation, and recommendations. Their work will inform product and policy decisions and, where appropriate, contribute to external publications. We are looking for a hands-on empirical social scientist with exceptional methodological judgment.
In this role, you will:
Develop and execute a research agenda on AI’s social impact, including effects on well-being, learning, social connection, trust, and human decision-making, in partnership with product and policy teams.
Own empirical studies end to end: define the question and estimand, choose the design, build the dataset, conduct the analysis, and explain what the evidence supports.
Analyze large-scale production and behavioral data, linking them to experiments, surveys, or external outcomes when appropriate to measure real-world effects.
Design randomized experiments and credible observational studies; test identification assumptions, quantify uncertainty, and distinguish association from causal effects.
Develop and validate measures of social outcomes, including human and LLM-assisted annotations; assess measurement error, subgroup performance, and drift.
Translate findings into concrete product and policy recommendations, with clear limits on causal interpretation, generalizability, and decision confidence.
Partner with Product Policy, Research, Product, Data Science, Engineering, UXR, Legal, and domain experts; contribute rigorous work to external publications when appropriate.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
A PhD or equivalent research experience in sociology, political science, psychology, communication, computational social science, or a related empirical field, with demonstrated independent research ownership.
Deep expertise in research design, causal inference, experimentation, statistical analysis, and measurement, demonstrated through work you can personally explain and defend.
Strong SQL and Python or R skills, with experience independently constructing and analyzing complex behavioral datasets and producing reproducible research.
A record of research that informs consequential decisions about technology and people, with the judgment to identify both useful findings and unresolved uncertainty.
Clear writing for technical and policy audiences, and experience producing rigorous research papers or equivalent public technical work.
The ability to move quickly, collaborate across functions, and maintain scientific independence when findings are sensitive or inconvenient.
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.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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