$5,55,000 plus equity: OpenAI is hiring a head of preparedness: Here's what the role involves

OpenAI has opened hiring for a Head of Preparedness at its San Francisco office, offering a salary of $555,000 along with equity, as the company deepens its focus on scaling safety systems for increasingly powerful AI models.

The role sits within OpenAI's Safety Systems team, which is responsible for ensuring that the company's most capable models are responsibly developed and deployed. According to the job listing, the team builds evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks to ensure models behave as intended in real-world settings.

OpenAI said it has invested heavily in preparedness across multiple generations of frontier models, developing core capability evaluations, threat models, and cross-functional mitigations. As model capabilities increase and safeguards become more complex, preparedness has become a "major priority". The new hire will be tasked with expanding, strengthening, and guiding this programme so safety standards scale alongside model capabilities.

About the Role

As Head of Preparedness, the role holder will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI's preparedness framework, which explains the company's approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. The position carries direct responsibility for building and coordinating capability evaluations, threat models, and mitigations into what OpenAI describes as a "coherent, rigorous, and operationally scalable safety pipeline".

The role requires deep technical judgement, clear communication, and the ability to guide complex work across multiple risk domains. The head of preparedness will lead a small, high-impact team focused on core preparedness research, while working closely with teams across Safety Systems and OpenAI to ensure end-to-end adoption of the framework.

According to the job description, responsibilities include owning OpenAI's preparedness strategy end-to-end by building capability evaluations, establishing threat models, and coordinating mitigations. The role will also lead the development of frontier capability evaluations, ensuring they are precise, robust, and scalable across rapid product cycles.

The position will oversee mitigation design across major risk areas such as cyber and bio risks, ensuring safeguards are technically sound, effective, and aligned with underlying threat models. It will also guide the interpretation of evaluation results so they directly inform launch decisions, policy choices, and safety cases.

OpenAI said the preparedness framework will need to evolve continuously as new risks, capabilities, and external expectations emerge. The head of preparedness will be expected to refine and update the framework accordingly, while collaborating across research, engineering, product, policy monitoring and enforcement teams, governance functions, and external partners to integrate preparedness into real-world deployment.