Abuse Investigator
Legal & CompliancePosted 8 Jun 2026
Advertised as “Abuse Investigator - Child Safety”
Posted 8 Jun 2026
Advertised as “Abuse Investigator - Child Safety”
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
| Base salary | US$158,500 – US$425,000 / yr |
|---|
About the Team
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe achieving this goal requires real-world deployment and continuous iteration based on how our products are used—and misused—in practice.
The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this mission by identifying, analyzing, and investigating misuse of our products, particularly novel or emerging abuse patterns. Our work enables partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scalable safety mitigations. By precisely understanding abuse, we help ensure OpenAI’s products can be used safely to build meaningful, legitimate applications.
About the Role
As a Child Safety Investigator on the Intelligence & Investigations team, you will identify and disrupt actors attempting to use OpenAI’s products to sexually exploit minors both online and in the real world. OpenAI maintains strict prohibitions in this area and reports apparent CSAM and other credible child sexual exploitation threats to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), consistent with applicable law and our policies.
This role requires domain-specific expertise, technical fluency, and the ability to operate in ambiguous, high-impact situations. You will conduct in-depth investigations into user behavior, analyze product data, identify emerging threat patterns, and support enforcement actions — including escalations requiring legal review and external reporting.
You will also help develop detection strategies that proactively surface high-risk behavior, especially cases that evade existing safeguards. This role includes responding to time-sensitive escalations. Investigations may involve exposure to sensitive and disturbing material, including sexual or violent content.
In this role, you will:
Investigate high-severity child safety violations and disrupt malicious actors in partnership with Policy, Legal, Integrity, Global Affairs, Security, and Engineering teams, including through cross-platform and cross-internet research
Support investigations across other high-risk harm areas where child safety concerns intersect
Conduct open-source and cross-platform research to contextualize actors and abuse networks
Develop detection signals, behavioral heuristics, and tracking strategies to proactively identify high-risk users using tools such as SQL, Databricks, and Python
Communicate investigation findings clearly and effectively to internal stakeholders through written briefs, data-backed recommendations, and escalation summaries
Develop a deep, working understanding of OpenAI’s products, internal data systems, and enforcement mechanisms
Collaborate with engineering and data partners to improve investigative tooling, data quality, and analyst workflows
Support time-sensitive escalations and high-priority investigations requiring rapid analysis and sound judgment
Represent investigative findings and work externally with the press, governments, NGOs, and law enforcement agencies
Participate in a rotating on-call schedule to support timely response to high-priority safety incidents and sensitive investigations
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have deep expertise in online child safety and child exploitation threats
Have familiarity or proficiency with technical investigations, especially using SQL, Python, Notebooks and scripts in a government, law enforcement and/or tech-company setting
Speak one or more languages in addition to English
Have at least 5+ years of experience tracking threat actors in abuse domains
Have worked on time-sensitive escalations involving high-risk harm
Have presented analytic findings to senior stakeholders or external partners
Have experience scaling and automating processes, especially with language models
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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