Special Projects Lead

About the Team

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn.

The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products - especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products.

About the Role

As a Special Projects Lead within the Intelligence & Investigations team, you will serve as a strategic and operational partner to the Investigation Team's leadership. This role blends elements of chief of staff, strategic program management, and operational leadership, helping the organization translate strategy into execution.

You will lead cross-functional initiatives, oversee complex programs, and build the systems that allow the team to operate effectively as it scales. This includes coordinating strategic planning cycles, tracking key initiatives, developing operational metrics, and ensuring high-priority projects move from concept to execution to completion.

You will work closely with investigators, analysts, engineers, and leadership across OpenAI to ensure that safety initiatives are executed efficiently and that critical programs stay on track despite high ambiguity and competing priorities.

This role requires someone who thrives in complex environments, can manage multiple high-stakes initiatives simultaneously, and enjoys solving ambiguous operational challenges.

This role is remote friendly but will require PST hours. You're also welcome to work from our San Francisco office, with relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with team leadership to run periodic planning cycles, translating strategic priorities into clear roadmaps, milestones, and OKRs while tracking progress across complex initiatives.

• Drive and support cross-functional programs involving investigators, subject matter experts, legal stakeholders, and communications and policy partners by maintaining clear timelines, ownership structures, and accountability.

• Identify and resolve operational blockers across teams, ensuring high-priority initiatives move efficiently from planning through execution.

• Identify and support the reporting of metrics and team outcomes to a variety of stakeholders.

• Lead complex and/or ambiguous initiatives that do not yet have a clear owner, driving projects from concept through execution while aligning stakeholders across the organization.

• Produce concise written updates, dashboards, and strategic briefings for leadership while acting as connective tissue with partner teams including Product, Legal, Global Affairs, Safety Systems, and Communications.

• Be someone people enjoy working with and appreciate the opportunity to help others

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in program management, strategic operations, chief of staff roles, consulting, or comparable environments.

• Have experience managing complex cross-functional programs involving technical, operational, and policy stakeholders.

• Thrive in high-ambiguity environments, bringing structure and clarity to evolving priorities and loosely defined problems.

• Are a systems thinker who enjoys building processes, metrics frameworks, dashboards, or OKR tracking systems that improve team effectiveness but in a way that doesn't feel rigid or overly complex to partners.

• Communicate clearly and concisely with both technical and non-technical audiences and are motivated by OpenAI's mission to build safe and responsible AI systems.

• Enjoy moving fast in highly ambiguous situations that may never have been considered before at other companies and taking leadership positions to ensure positive and safe outcomes.

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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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.

Compensation Range: $230.4K - $425K