Research Program Manager
OpenAIRole Description & Requirements
About the Team
OpenAI’s Research Program Management team partners with researchers and engineers to advance the development of increasingly capable, safe, and beneficial AI systems. We work alongside teams developing our core models, helping turn ambitious research goals into coordinated execution across model training, alignment and safety, and research infrastructure. The team also regularly collaborates with our closest cross-functional partners such as Security, Applied product and engineering, Strategy, and Scaling.
About the Role
As a Research Program Manager, you will embed with research teams and help drive some of the most technically complex and consequential work behind OpenAI’s model development. Depending on your focus, your work may span training, reasoning, evaluations, compute, research infrastructure, safety, model launch readiness, and governance.
You will translate evolving research priorities into actionable programs, help teams navigate technical and operational tradeoffs, and keep important work moving as new issues emerge. This is a hands-on technical role: you will engage directly with research workflows, experimental results, technical systems, and engineering constraints; not simply coordinate from the sidelines.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 5+ years of experience in research program management, technical program management, or related roles in fast-moving environments.
Can engage substantively with researchers and engineers on topics such as model training, experimental design, model safety, evaluation methods, data workflows, compute infrastructure, or distributed systems.
Are comfortable working directly with technical tools, research data, experimental results, or operational workflows to understand problems and develop practical solutions.
Have a strong track record of moving complex, ambiguous technical initiatives forward across multiple teams and stakeholders.
Can distinguish what is known from what is uncertain, ask incisive technical questions, and help teams make sound decisions with incomplete information.
Know how to introduce structure without creating unnecessary processes, and care about making researchers more effective.
Bring a high bar for quality and can recognize when evidence, evaluation results, or execution plans need closer scrutiny.
Communicate clearly across technical and nontechnical audiences, including researchers, engineers, and organizational leaders.
Take ownership without waiting for perfect conditions, adapt quickly as priorities change, and follow difficult problems through to resolution.
Care deeply about advancing AI research responsibly and helping ensure increasingly capable systems benefit humanity.
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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