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OpenAI is standing up an internal investigations function that builds its own detection and human-review tooling for child sexual abuse and other high-severity harms, signaling that abuse prevention is now an engineering-heavy, in-house discipline inside the company rather than something handled only by policy teams or outside vendors.
About the Team
The Intelligence & Investigations Engineering team builds systems that detect, analyze, and disrupt abuse across OpenAI’s products. We partner closely with the Child Safety team and cross-functional groups to protect users while advancing OpenAI’s goal of developing AI that benefits everyone.
About the Role
As a Fullstack Engineer focused on child safety, you’ll build data-intensive, AI-powered applications and infrastructure that enable operators and investigators to work effectively and responsibly. You’ll adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments to deliver well-crafted, reliable tooling for high-severity safety work.
*Candidates should understand this role involves exposure to sensitive and egregious content.
In this role, you will:
7+ years of experience as a software engineer
Prototype, build, and maintain intelligence systems that detect, triage, and enable efficient human review of possible high severity harm
Work hand in hand with operators and investigators, designing and delivering systems that enable them to do their work faster, more accurately, and more safely.
Develop across the stack: UIs, services, pipelines, and anything else required to solve the problems we face.
Interact with partners across Product Policy, Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research
Contribute to the team’s technical strategy, especially for child safety related tools and systems
Report on impact in a data-driven fashion
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a strong software engineering foundation and enjoy owning systems end-to-end—from infrastructure and data ingestion to frontend tooling
Are energized by working at the frontier of AI capabilities, integrating new models and APIs into practical systems
Have experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines or search/retrieval systems
Are proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, and familiar with tools like Spark, Kafka, Flink, data warehouses, and SQL
Take a product-minded approach, design with user workflows in mind, and iterate quickly based on feedback
Favor pragmatic solutions and can ship in hacky, low-support environments when needed
Are comfortable navigating ambiguity and open-ended problem spaces with evolving goals
Have prior experience working on engineering for high-severity harms
Bring intuition for the pain points and workflows of operations and investigative teams, and curiosity about solving complex investigations
Bonus: prior knowledge of child-safety-specific challenges such as secure handling of quarantined content and reporting to NCMEC
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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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.
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