OpenAI is hiring a Head of Preparedness at its San Francisco headquarters, offering a compensation package of $555,000 plus equity, as the company strengthens its focus on AI safety, risk mitigation, and responsible deployment of advanced AI models.
The senior role sits within OpenAI’s Safety Systems team, which is responsible for ensuring that the company’s most powerful and capable AI models are developed and released responsibly. As OpenAI continues to scale frontier models, the organisation is placing increased emphasis on AI preparedness, threat assessment, and safety frameworks.
According to the job listing, OpenAI has already invested heavily in preparedness across multiple generations of advanced AI systems. This includes developing capability evaluations, threat models, and cross-functional safety mitigations. However, as AI systems grow more complex and capable, preparedness has become a critical priority, requiring dedicated leadership to ensure safety measures evolve at the same pace.
The Head of Preparedness Role Involves
As Head of Preparedness, the selected candidate will define and lead the technical strategy for OpenAI’s preparedness framework, which outlines how the company tracks emerging AI capabilities and prepares for new risks that could cause serious harm. The role involves building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigation strategies into a scalable, end-to-end safety pipeline.
The position requires strong technical judgment, leadership skills, and cross-team collaboration, as the head of preparedness will work closely with teams across Safety Systems and OpenAI’s broader organisation. While leading a small, high-impact research team, the role also ensures that preparedness frameworks are adopted consistently across products and releases.
Key responsibilities include overseeing frontier AI capability evaluations, designing safeguards for high-risk areas such as cybersecurity and biological threats, and ensuring that safety measures are technically sound and aligned with real-world risk models. The role will also play a direct part in interpreting evaluation results to guide model launch decisions, internal policy choices, and safety cases.
With rising global scrutiny around AI governance, AI risk management, and responsible AI development, this high-paying leadership role reflects OpenAI’s commitment to scaling safety alongside innovation.
