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Technical Program Manager, Foundations Data and Operations

OpenAI


Job Location:

San Francisco, CA - USA

Yearly Salary: USD 207000 - 285000
Posted: 3 September 2026 (10 hours ago)
Application Deadline: 1 December 2026
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

About the Team

The Search research team focuses on building the systems that help AI systems find retrieve and use information from the world. We aim to make answers more useful and grounded for more than a billion ChatGPT users.

About the Role

Were looking for a Technical Program Manager to lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search. Youll partner closely with researchers engineers and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans resolve dependencies and move complex technical work forward.

This role combines technical depth product judgment and hands-on execution. Youll work across retrieval indexing and model improvements while collaborating with policy legal and external data partners. Youll help teams make informed tradeoffs and build practical ways of working that support a fast-moving research environment.

This role is based in San Francisco CA.

In this role you will:

  • Lead programs across model training retrieval large-scale indexing and search infrastructure.

  • Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners milestones dependencies and resource needs.

  • Partner with research engineering and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope quality performance timelines and cost.

  • Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage answer quality responsiveness and trust.

  • Identify technical and cross-functional risks early drive blockers to resolution and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.

  • Coordinate with product policy legal and external partners on data access use and presentation helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.

  • Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have substantial technical experience and a record of delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large technical stack.

  • Have worked on search information retrieval indexing or similarly complex systems. Direct experience with consumer or enterprise search products is especially valuable.

  • Can understand technical architectures and tradeoffs ask useful questions and communicate effectively with both engineers and researchers.

  • Bring clarity to ambiguous research problems and adapt plans as teams learn while maintaining ownership and momentum.

  • Combine product judgment with program discipline connecting technical decisions to the quality of the user experience.

  • Are resourceful and hands-on comfortable moving between program strategy and the details needed to unblock execution.

  • Build trust across functions communicate clearly and influence decisions across teams with different priorities.

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.


Required Experience:

IC


About Company

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We believe our research will eventually lead to artificial general intelligence, a system that can solve human-level problems. Building safe and beneficial AGI is our mission.

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