Trusted Access Lead, Critical Harm Operations

About the team Trusted Access helps eligible customers access and use advanced AI capabilities with appropriate safeguards. Within User Safety & Risk Operations, we connect customer onboarding, eligibility review, access provisioning, and support into a service customers can navigate with confidence. We work with Product, Engineering, technical support, regional operations, and customer-facing teams to resolve difficult access problems and improve the systems behind them. Our work combines sound judgment on individual cases with better products, clearer guidance, and automation that reduces unnecessary friction. About the role We’re looking for a senior operations leader to own the Trusted Access operating strategy and lead a team of risk-operations specialists. You will set priorities across programs, build a reliable customer access service, and hire, manage, and develop your direct reports. This role combines program ownership with formal people management. You will establish shared commitments with technical support and regional escalation leaders, who manage their own teams, and bring those groups together around customer outcomes. You’ll stay close enough to complex cases to challenge assumptions while giving specialists the ownership and capacity to fix recurring problems. Success means customers reach the right access outcome with clear communication, teams make consistent decisions, and the service scales with less avoidable escalation and manual work. In this role, you will: - Own the operating strategy and roadmap across Trusted Access programs, translating customer needs and organizational priorities into clear service commitments, ownership, and investment decisions. - Build a coherent customer journey from application and eligibility review through approval, provisioning coordination, and confirmed access, including appeals and subsequent access changes. Establish clear handoffs and route exceptions to authorized decision-makers. - Hire, coach, and develop your team. Set expectations, delegate meaningful ownership, give direct feedback, address performance gaps, and build the capabilities needed as programs grow. - Make capacity and prioritization decisions across urgent customer needs, launch readiness, and lasting improvements. Coordinate regional coverage, vendor support, and backup with partner teams while protecting time to eliminate recurring work. - Lead consequential customer escalations, bringing incomplete or conflicting evidence into a clear decision process. Align owners on the next action and ensure customers receive accurate updates and a clear resolution. - Turn support patterns into a prioritized roadmap with Product and Engineering: improve onboarding, provisioning workflows, tooling, self-service, and AI-assisted operations. Validate that changes work before expanding them. - Establish measures of service health and decision quality. Distinguish fast responses from actual resolution, investigate persistent delays, and use evidence to change priorities. - Prepare new programs and customer channels for launch and scale. Align support responsibilities, review standards, customer guidance, and technical dependencies; make readiness gaps and tradeoffs clear to leadership. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have built and run complex customer support, onboarding, access, risk, or service operations, with measurable improvements beyond handling more volume. - Have formally managed people through hiring, development, difficult feedback, and performance decisions, and can show how your leadership increased the team’s capability and ownership. 5+ years of management experience preferred. - Can make defensible tradeoffs among customer commitments, safeguards, service quality, and capacity, even when stakeholders disagree or the evidence is incomplete. - Have led work across teams you do not manage, resolving ownership gaps and negotiating commitments that hold up in execution. - Are analytically and technically fluent enough to diagnose workflow failures, evaluate automation, and partner effectively on product and provisioning changes. - Communicate with precision and empathy, from explaining an access blocker to a customer to presenting a difficult investment decision to leadership. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. 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