Senior Program Manager, Consumer Device Safety Operations

ABOUT THE TEAM At OpenAI, the User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect 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 improvements to our systems. This role sits on a team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving company priorities. The team defines what needs to be built, creates the operating model to support it, and works with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time. ABOUT THE ROLE We are looking for a senior individual contributor to build the safety and risk operating model for a new category of consumer devices. The core need is a high-agency operator who can take a complex, unstructured problem, create the right structure, align technical and operational partners, and drive the work through launch and early operations. This is a foundational role: the systems you build will shape how OpenAI launches, monitors, and improves a new category of consumer devices safely at scale. You will define how safety incidents, critical escalations, privacy-sensitive reports, fraud & ownership disputes, and other emerging device risks should be identified, investigated, escalated, resolved, and learned from. You will turn incomplete requirements into practical workflows, decision rights, launch plans, quality controls, measurement, and durable ownership. The role centers on program building, operational judgment, and execution. Direct consumer-hardware experience is helpful but not required. The strongest candidates learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and translate product, engineering, policy, legal, and user needs into operations that work in practice. Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office. Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL - Lead strategic operational builds for device-safety priorities from problem statement to implemented operating model, including scope, owners, milestones, risks, success measures, and execution cadence. - Define intake, severity criteria, decision rights, evidence requirements, escalation paths, response standards, closure criteria, and post-incident learning for high-risk cases. - Translate product, engineering, legal, privacy, policy, support, and operational constraints into workflows, requirements, playbooks, and controls that teams can execute. - Build launch-readiness plans, training, quality controls, reporting, monitoring, and early-life response mechanisms. - Coordinate across Product, Hardware and Software Engineering, Product Quality, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Logistics, vendors, and USRO to resolve dependencies and keep critical work moving. - Use operational data, customer signals, product telemetry, case outcomes, and qualitative evidence to identify patterns, assess risk, and recommend action when the evidence is incomplete. - Drive critical escalations and cross-functional decisions to closure with clear context, accountable owners, documented decisions, and durable follow-through. - Create the mechanisms that make complex programs run well, including roadmaps, decision logs, risk registers, operating reviews, status updates, and executive communication. - Identify where AI tools, automation, lightweight systems, or simpler workflows can improve speed, consistency, investigation, and quality while preserving appropriate human judgment. - Stand up priority workflows, operate them through launch and stabilization, and transition mature capabilities into durable homes across USRO and partner teams. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU - Have 8+ years of experience in program management, strategy and operations, product operation…