Cyber Operations Lead, Critical Harm Operations

The posting, as OpenAI wrote it

About the Team

Critical Harm Operations sits within User Safety & Risk Operations and builds enforcement systems for the most severe user-safety risks—including Frontier Risk and Material Harm—that are accurate, fast, defensible, and scalable. The Cyber vertical turns policy into reviewer standards, calibrated judgment, quality systems, escalation paths, and safe automation.

About the Role

We’re looking for a senior cybersecurity and cyber intelligence practitioner who is also an operations leader, strategist, and people manager. You’ll bring sound cyber judgment, strong analytical and automation instincts, and the ability to stay close to the work while setting direction, managing and developing people, aligning partners, building programs from 0→1, and translating ambiguity into durable operating systems.

This role combines senior individual-contributor depth with direct people-management accountability. You’ll personally shape complex cyber judgments, operating models, SOPs, quality systems, and automation strategies while building, coaching, and holding accountable a high-performing team. You’ll also lead through influence across FTEs, BPO partners, and cross-functional teams. Baseline operational health—including quality, queue coverage, productivity, and SLA adherence—is table stakes; success is additionally measured by durable improvements to decision quality, stakeholder alignment, reviewer capability, and the systems that run the operation.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Set the strategic direction for Cyber Operations and translate high-level organizational priorities into a clear operating model, roadmaps, SOPs, escalation paths, quality goals, and safe-access strategies.
• Serve as the senior cybersecurity and cyber intelligence expert for complex and high-risk decisions across ChatGPT, API, Codex, agents, and emerging product surfaces.
• Build trust, create clarity, navigate disagreement, and move people through ambiguity across FTEs, BPO partners, and cross-functional teams.
• Turn policy ambiguity, quality misses, appeals, and reviewer disagreement into clear decision rules, calibration examples, training, and tooling requirements.
• Build and scale reviewer capability through onboarding, certification, coaching, feedback, recurring calibration, and close partnership with vendor leadership.
• Own operational health across Cyber Operations, including queue coverage, reviewer productivity, quality metrics, SLA adherence, escalation hygiene, and proactive identification of performance gaps before downstream teams need to flag them.
• Use analysis and automation to diagnose root causes, surface risk, prioritize high-leverage fixes, and reduce manual effort.
• Build durable quality and evaluation systems that improve decision quality through calibration, adjudicatio

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