Senior Product Policy Lead, Regulation at OpenAI

Job description

About the Team The Product Policy team develops and implements policies that shape how OpenAI’s technology is built and used. We work with teams across the company to turn complex questions about AI’s benefits and risks into practical guidance for responsible research, product development, and deployment. About the Role As Product Policy Manager, Regulation, you will map external regulatory and legislative trends and synthesize them into concrete research, product, and policy requirements. You will connect deep expertise in regulation and public policy with a sophisticated understanding of AI and strong product judgment. Your remit will span frontier AI, youth, wellbeing, use in high-stakes domains, deceptive use, and other emerging issues. Working closely with Legal and Global Affairs, you will help Product, Engineering, Research, and Safety teams understand what external developments mean for their work, what decisions or evidence are needed, and how to act. We’re looking for someone who combines deep regulatory and public-policy expertise with an in-depth understanding of AI and a demonstrated ability to advise product and engineering teams. You should be able to move from complex external developments to clear decisions and requirements that teams can implement. This role can be based in San Francisco or Remote. 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: - Map and prioritize regulatory and legislative developments across jurisdictions and AI issue areas. Distinguish enacted requirements, proposals, guidance, and emerging expectations; assess their relevance, uncertainty, timing, and implications for our models and products. - Translate external developments into actionable research questions, evaluation needs, product requirements, and policy recommendations. Identify gaps in evidence, define the intended outcome and acceptance criteria, and make tradeoffs and open questions clear. - Advise Product, Engineering, Research, and Safety teams throughout design, launch, and iteration. Partner with Legal on legal interpretation and applicability, and with Global Affairs on legislative context and external engagement, to develop feasible implementation options and clear ownership. - Maintain traceability from external signals to internal decisions, requirements, and implementation. Track material changes, surface dependencies and emerging risks, and use research, product evidence, and expert input to refine recommendations and inform external policy discussions. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring substantial experience in AI or technology regulation, public policy, product policy, or a related field, including interpreting complex regulatory and legislative developments across jurisdictions and translating them into action. - Understand AI deeply, including model capabilities and limitations, training and deployment, evaluations, and safety mitigations. You can reason about how requirements differ at the model, product, and deployment levels and identify where further research is needed. - Have a strong record of product advising and close partnership with product managers, engineers, and researchers. You can turn ambiguous concerns into specifications, implementation options, acceptance criteria, and decisions that improve products. - Exercise sound judgment under uncertainty, prioritize across a broad portfolio, and manage work from an emerging external signal through implementation and iteration. - Communicate clearly and precisely with technical teams, legal and policy experts, and executives. You can explain regulatory complexity, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and resolve disagreement constructively. - Bring breadth across AI policy issues—including frontier risks, youth, wellbeing, high-stakes uses, and deceptive use—and the ability to build depth quickly with subject-matter experts, research, data, and user insights. 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 cdn.openai.com. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form form.asana.com. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link form.asana.com. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy cdn.openai.com At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Requirements

Must-haves

About the Team
You might thrive in this role if you:
Exercise sound judgment under uncertainty, prioritize across a broad portfolio, and manage work from an emerging external signal through implementation and iteration.
Communicate clearly and precisely with technical teams, legal and policy experts, and executives. You can explain regulatory complexity, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and resolve disagreement constructively.
Bring breadth across AI policy issues—including frontier risks, youth, wellbeing, high-stakes uses, and deceptive use—and the ability to build depth quickly with subject-matter experts, research, data, and user insights.

Nice-to-haves

None flagged.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

Platform: ashby
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