The posting, in OpenAI's own words
archived Nov 15, 2026About 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
We are hiring a senior applied scientist to study how AI affects people and society using OpenAI production data, experiments, and social science methods. This role sits at the intersection of applied social science, AI, and product policy. The scientist will own research from an ambiguous question through study design, data collection and analysis, methodological validation, and recommendations. Their work will inform product and policy decisions and, where appropriate, contribute to external publications. We are looking for a hands-on empirical social scientist with exceptional methodological judgment.
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In this role, you will:
Develop and execute a research agenda on AI’s social impact, including effects on well-being, learning, social connection, trust, and human decision-making, in partnership with product and policy teams. Own empirical studies end to end: define the question and estimand, choose the design, build the dataset, conduct the analysis, and explain what the evidence supports. Analyze large-scale production and behavioral data, linking them to experiments, surveys, or external outcomes when appropriate to measure real-world effects. Design randomized experiments and credible observational studies; test identification assumptions, quantify uncertainty, and distinguish association from causal effects. Develop and validate measures of social outcomes, including human and LLM-assisted annotations; assess measurement error, subgroup performance, and drift. Translate findings into concrete product and policy recommendations, with clear limits on causal interpretation, generalizability, and decision confidence. Partner with Product Policy, Research, Product, Data Science, Engineering, UXR, Legal, and domain experts; contribute rigorous work to external publications when appropriate.