Safety Response Operations Lead

About the Role

The Global Safety Response Operations Lead is a hands-on team lead who both manages a regional Safety Response team and personally handles high-risk safety cases. This role combines frontline safety work with people leadership, operational ownership, and cross-functional coordination.

You will lead a team of Safety Response Analysts who handle OpenAI’s most sensitive and high-impact cases, while also personally contributing to casework for complex, high-risk, or high-visibility issues. You will own the execution of high severity escalations in your region and ensure proper execution and communication to cross functional stakeholders

You will be accountable for ensuring your region consistently meets utilization, quality, and SLA targets while serving as the operational interface with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and regional stakeholders.

This is a 24/7 global operation that requires flexibility to support rotating shifts, including nights, weekends, and holidays, as part of a leadership on-call model.

In This Role, You Will

• Lead and coach a regional team of Safety Response Analysts, ensuring high performance, engagement, and consistent decision quality.
• Own regional operational outcomes, including utilization, SLA adherence, backlog health, and quality benchmarks.
• Handle and oversee the most complex and high-risk cases, serving as the first line of escalation and incident lead for your region.
• Contribute directly to frontline work (20–30%), including investigations, enforcement decisions, and regulatory or legal escalations.
• Partner cross-functionally with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and local market teams to execute safety outcomes and manage risk.
• Drive operational excellence and continuous improvement, improving workflows, tools, automation, and escalation paths.
• Identify emerging risks and trends, translating frontline insights into actionable recommendations for policy, product, or enforcement.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• You have 5+ years in Trust & Safety, Risk Operations, Investigations, Fraud, Annotation, or platform integrity.
• You have 4+ years of people leadership or senior-level operational ownership.
• You are a strong decision-maker in ambiguous, high-risk environments, able to balance speed, accuracy, and defensibility when handling sensitive or high-impact cases.
• You communicate complex safety and risk decisions clearly and credibly, whether writing escalation narratives, briefing Legal or Policy, or aligning Product and leadership during incidents.
• You can translate between frontline operations and strategic stakeholders, turning messy real-world cases into structured insights and turning policy or product direction into clear, executable guidance for your team.
• You are skilled at influencing without authority, building trust with Product, Policy, Legal, Investigations, and regional partners to drive alignment and resolve ambiguity.
• You are deeply familiar with content moderation, user safety, fraud, or developer risk frameworks, including the legal, policy, and technical considerations that shape enforcement.
• You use data, tooling, and automation to improve quality, efficiency, and scale to not just measure performance, but to make better decisions.
• You are comfortable leading in a 24/7, high-pressure operational environment, providing calm, credible leadership during incidents, spikes, and regulatory or reputational events.