Senior Manager, EHS - Robotics

About the Team OpenAI's Environmental, Health & Safety (EHS) team partners across the company to enable safe, responsible growth. This role will be a senior EHS partner to our robotics operations as our operating footprint expands. You will work closely with Robotics, Engineering, Operations, Facilities, Workplace, Construction, Security, People, Legal, and external partners to integrate safety into how our facilities are designed, built, staffed, and operated. About the Role We are seeking a Senior Manager, EHS - Robotics to provide senior, hands-on safety leadership across multiple sites. This role is for an experienced EHS leader who can operate independently in a fast-moving technical environment, anticipate risk before it becomes an incident, and build practical safety systems that scale with the business. Our robotics operations are scaling quickly, with a growing mix of construction, commissioning, workforce expansion, and around-the-clock operations. This creates a complex and evolving risk environment and requires strong preventive planning, consistent field presence, and sustained incident-management oversight. This leader will own site-level EHS strategy and execution for the robotics portfolio while partnering with the broader EHS team on company-wide standards and programs. The successful candidate will look around corners: planning for future ramps, identifying requirements early, influencing design and operating decisions, and creating durable systems that enable teams to move quickly without compromising safety. In this role you will: • Serve as a senior EHS partner across robotics R&D operations, owning site-level safety strategy, priorities, and execution as the footprint scales. • Anticipate EHS requirements for new operations, equipment, processes, construction phases, staffing ramps, and 24/7 operations, and translate them into practical plans before work begins. • Lead proactive risk identification and control across robotics activities, including machine safety, ergonomics, electrical safety, material handling, hazardous materials, contractor safety, and other site-specific risks. • Build and maintain site EHS programs, risk assessments, procedures, training, inspections, corrective-action systems, emergency preparedness, and compliance processes appropriate to each site's risk profile. • Partner with Robotics, Engineering, Operations, Facilities, Workplace, Construction, Security, People, Legal, and vendors to embed safety into facility design, equipment deployment, work planning, and operating decisions. • Provide visible field leadership across shifts and operating conditions, establishing mechanisms that support effective EHS coverage and escalation for 24/7 operations. • Lead incident response and investigation for significant events; ensure timely fact-finding, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, verification, trend analysis, and communication of lessons learned. • Use incident, near-miss, inspection, and operational data to identify recurring risks and drive preventive actions across sites rather than addressing events in isolation. • Oversee contractor and contingent-worker safety interfaces, clarifying responsibilities, expectations, reporting, and corrective-action ownership across multi-employer worksites. • Maintain strong regulatory compliance and readiness, including applicable Cal/OSHA and OSHA requirements, while developing metrics and reporting that make site risks, actions, and performance visible to leadership. You’ll thrive in this role if you have: • 15+ years of progressive EHS experience, including significant leadership responsibility in robotics, advanced manufacturing, R&D, industrial, or similarly complex technical environments. • Strong technical knowledge across occupational safety and health, with depth in areas such as machine safety, ergonomics, electrical safety, hazardous energy, material handling, hazardous materials, contractor safety, and incident investigation. • Demonstrated experience supporting complex sites through rapid scale, construction and operational overlap, commissioning, process change, or transition to extended or 24/7 operations. • Strong working knowledge of OSHA and Cal/OSHA requirements and the ability to translate regulatory obligations into practical, scalable operating programs. • Demonstrated success influencing senior technical and operational leaders, especially where EHS does not directly own the work and decisions must be made through partnership. • Experience building EHS systems, programs, metrics, vendor support, and operating rhythms for an emerging or rapidly scaling organization. • Strong judgment and the ability to balance operational speed, technical complexity, workforce needs, compliance, and risk without defaulting to overly rigid solutions. • Clear, credible communication skills with executives, engineers, operators, contractors, employees, and external partners, including the ability to communicate during high-pressure incidents. • Comfort operating independently in ambiguity, with the technical depth, field orientation, pragmatism, and ownership needed to anticipate what is coming and build durable safety capability ahead of growth. 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. 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