Data Scientist, User Operations

About the Team

OpenAI’s User Operations organization is building the data and intelligence layer behind AI-assisted operations — the systems that decide when automation should help users, when humans should step in, and how both improve over time. Our flagship platform is transforming customer support into a model for “agent-first” operations across OpenAI.

About the Role

As a Data Scientist on User Operations, you’ll design the models, metrics, and experimentation frameworks that power OpenAI’s human-AI collaboration loop. You’ll build systems that measure quality, optimize automation, and turn operational data into insights that improve product and user experience at scale. You’ll partner closely with Support Automation Engineering, Product, and Data Engineering to ensure our data systems are production-grade, trusted, and impactful.

This role is based in San Francisco or New York City. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Why it matters

Every conversation users have with OpenAI products produces signals about how humans and AI interact. User Ops Data Science turns those signals into insights that shape how we support users today and design agentic systems for tomorrow. This is a unique opportunity to help define how AI collaboration at scale is measured and improved inside OpenAI.

In this role, you will:

• Build and own metrics, classifiers, and data pipelines that determine automation eligibility, effectiveness, and guardrails.

• Design and evaluate experiments that quantify the impact of automation and AI systems on user outcomes like resolution quality and satisfaction.

• Develop predictive and statistical models that improve how OpenAI’s support systems automate, measure, and learn from user interactions.

• Partner with engineering and product teams to create feedback loops that continuously improve our AI agents and knowledge systems.

• Translate complex data into clear, actionable insights for leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.

• Develop and socialize dashboards, applications, and other ways of enabling the team and company to answer product data questions in a self-serve way

• Contribute to establishing data science standards and best practices in an AI-native operations environment.

• Partner with other data scientists across the company to share knowledge and continually synthesize learnings across the organization

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 10+ years of experience in data science roles within product or technology organizations.

• Expertise in statistics and causal inference, applied in both experimentation and observational causal inference studies.

• Expert-level SQL and proficiency in Python for analytics, modeling, and experimentation.

• Proven experience designing and interpreting experiments and making statistically sound recommendations.

• Experience building data systems or pipelines that power production workflows or ML-based decisioning.

• Experience developing and extracting insights from business intelligence tools, such as Mode, Tableau, and Looker.

• Strategic and impact-driven mindset, capable of translating complex business problems into actionable frameworks.

• Ability to build relationships with diverse stakeholders and cultivate strong partnerships.

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders and collaborate across various functions to ensure business impact.

• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment with limited structure.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to translate complex data into stories for non-technical partners.

Nice-to-haves:

• Familiarity with large language models or AI-assisted operations platforms.

• Experience in operational automation or customer support analytics.

• Background in experimentation infrastructure or human-AI interaction systems.

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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