Engineering Manager, Guardian

About the Team The Guardian team builds practical safety and oversight systems for increasingly capable AI agents. Our goal is to make it possible for agents to take on longer-running, higher-autonomy work while preserving meaningful safeguards, respecting user intent, and intervening when actions could cause serious or difficult-to-reverse harm. Auto-review is an early example of this work. When an agent reaches a permission boundary, a separate model evaluates the proposed action in context and determines whether it should proceed. The team is now extending this foundation into more capable oversight systems that account for richer user context, support a broader range of agent experiences, and integrate across OpenAI products. Guardian sits at the intersection of engineering, alignment research, product, infrastructure, and security. The team already has a strong engineering foundation in London and will continue to grow there as a concentrated, highly collaborative group. About the Role We are looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow the Guardian team in London. You will own the engineering strategy and execution for production systems that evaluate agent behavior, identify risk, and take appropriate action without creating unnecessary friction for users. This is a builder-manager role with substantial technical depth. You will set direction, develop engineers, and create the operating cadence for a high-performing team, while remaining close enough to the work to shape architecture, review designs, debug difficult problems, and write code when it is the highest-leverage way to help the team move forward. The role is highly visible and cross-functional. You will work closely with alignment researchers to translate emerging research into dependable systems, and with product teams to make agent safety a foundational capability across OpenAI. This role is based in our London office. In this role, you will - Lead, hire, and develop a London-based team of engineers working across agent safety, backend systems, applied AI, and product infrastructure. - Set the technical roadmap for Auto-review and the broader Guardian platform, balancing safety, product utility, latency, and operational reliability. - Build production systems that evaluate agent actions in real time, detect potentially harmful behavior, and support safe recovery or escalation paths. - Improve how oversight systems understand user intent, environmental context, permissions, and relevant personalization signals while protecting privacy and avoiding unnecessary friction. - Partner closely with alignment researchers to turn prototypes, evaluations, and new monitoring techniques into scalable product capabilities. - Work across Product, Security, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to integrate Guardian capabilities into agent experiences throughout OpenAI. - Establish rigorous evaluation and operational practices, including adversarial testing, failure analysis, monitoring, and metrics for safety performance, false positives, latency, and user impact. You might thrive in this role if you - Have significant experience leading engineering teams that shipped complex, high-stakes production systems end to end. - Have built with AI agents or large language models in a core product, startup, or technically serious independent project, and understand the unique challenges of agentic systems. - Bring strong product-engineering judgment and can navigate tradeoffs across safety, usability, speed, and reliability. - Can partner effectively with research teams, translate open-ended findings into engineering plans, and communicate clearly across technical disciplines. - Have a thoughtful management system for hiring, coaching, pe