Research Program Manager, Governance

About the Team

OpenAI’s Governance team helps shape how the company responsibly develops and deploys increasingly capable AI. We bring together technical evidence, policy, and operational perspectives to help the company address emerging risks, resolve difficult questions, and make well-supported decisions.

Our work includes shaping and improving governance practices, supporting effective oversight, developing clear assessments and recommendations, and ensuring that decisions lead to action. We work closely with research, safety, security, legal, and product teams to identify gaps, reconcile different views, and improve our approach as capabilities and circumstances change.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience leading complex, cross-functional work in a research, technology, policy, safety, security, governance, or related environment.
• Take initiative, move quickly, and find practical ways forward when ownership, requirements, or the path to an answer are unclear.
• Are intellectually curious and can learn unfamiliar subjects well enough to ask sharp questions, test an argument, and recognize when deeper expertise is needed.
• Can synthesize complicated or conflicting information without losing important distinctions, limitations, or uncertainty.
• Write clearly and precisely, particularly when explaining difficult issues and recommendations to senior decision-makers.
• Bring strong program-management fundamentals and a record of turning ambiguous requests into work that gets finished.
• Exercise sound judgment in sensitive situations, navigate disagreement constructively, and know when to act independently or seek a decision.
• Are willing to try new approaches, learn from feedback, and change your mind when the evidence changes.
• Build useful structure without adding unnecessary process.
• Care deeply about the responsible development and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.

Helpful experience:

• Research program management or strategy and operations in a technically complex organization.
• AI safety, preparedness, model evaluations, cybersecurity, or technical risk management.
• Advisory committees, board-facing work, executive decision support, or other consequential reviews.
• Translating policies, standards, or governance decisions into practical requirements and programs.
• Strategic partnerships or sensitive deployment contexts.

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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