Research Program Manager

About This Role

This hands-on technical role involves embedding with research teams to drive the technically complex work behind OpenAI's model development. It suits a program manager who can translate evolving research priorities into actionable programs and help teams navigate technical and operational trade-offs, working directly with research workflows and technical systems.

Responsibilities

• Translate evolving research priorities into actionable programs
• Help teams navigate technical and operational trade-offs
• Keep important work moving as new issues emerge
• Engage directly with research workflows, experimental results, technical systems, and engineering constraints

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in research program management, technical program management, or related roles in fast-moving environments
• Ability to 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
• Comfortable working directly with technical tools, research data, experimental results, or operational workflows to understand problems and develop practical solutions
• Strong track record of moving complex, ambiguous technical initiatives forward across multiple teams and stakeholders
• Ability to distinguish what is known from what is uncertain, ask incisive technical questions, and help teams make sound decisions with incomplete information
• Knowledge of how to introduce structure without creating unnecessary processes, and care about making researchers more effective
• High bar for quality and ability to recognize when evidence, evaluation results, or execution plans need closer scrutiny
• Clear communication 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
• Deep care about advancing AI research responsibly and helping ensure increasingly capable systems benefit humanity

Important Details

• Work format: hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week

About the Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company pushes the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seeks to safely deploy them to the world through its products.