Assistant Director Of Operations in San Francisco

About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a researcher focused on our embedding retrieval efforts. You’ll work with a a team of world-class research scientists and engineers developing foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on the right information, at the right time. This includes designing new embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods. This work will support retrieval across many OpenAI products and internal research efforts, with opportunities for scientific publication and deep technical impact. 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. Responsibilities Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning. Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluati

About the Team The Privacy Engineering team builds the systems and technical foundations that govern how user data is understood, retained, accessed, and used across OpenAI. We partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to translate policy and trust commitments into durable architecture and enforceable controls. Our work spans data inventory and mapping, classification and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, purpose and usage controls, auditability, and lifecycle automation. We aim to make policy-aligned data handling the default while giving teams clear, reliable primitives for building and operating products at scale. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to drive the architecture and execution of user data governance across OpenAI. You will define technical direction, build shared platforms and controls, and lead cross-functional programs that make data flows discoverable, policies enforceable, and ownership explicit. This role is well suited to a senior engineer who can move between deep systems design and organization-wide influence, turn ambiguous requirements into pragmatic roadmaps, and operate high-trust systems end to end. This position is based in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Set the technical strategy and architecture for user data governance across data mapping, classification, lineage, retention, deletion, access, and permitted usage. Design and build shared services, APIs, metadata systems, and policy-enforcement mechanisms that make governance controls consistent, scalable, and auditable. Establish reliable inventories of user data, system ownership, data flows, and policy applicability across products, infrastructure, analytics, and research systems. Partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal leaders to define decision rights, translate requirements into controls, and drive adoption across teams. Own governance systems

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads. Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware. Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments. Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales. Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime b

About the Team The Intelligence and Investigations team seeks to rapidly detect and disrupt abuse in AI technologies to ensure their safe use. We are dedicated to identifying emerging abuse trends, analyzing risks, and working with our internal partners to implement effective mitigation strategies to protect against misuse. Our efforts contribute to OpenAI's overarching goal of developing AI that benefits all of humanity. About the Role As an Intelligence Systems Engineer, you’ll be focused on advancing our Intelligence & Investigations efforts at OpenAI, ensuring the safe and responsible use of AI across our products and services. We are seeking a self-starter to prototype, develop, and maintain new tools and processes that integrate OpenAI’s models and infrastructure to enable internal teams to make sense of large, open-domain datasets, fight abuse, and inform high-stakes decisions. You will be a crucial technical bridge between our data scientists and subject matter experts and technical teams like Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research by leading the development of innovative tools and processes that bolster goals in scaled collections, investigations, and analysis. The ideal candidate has strong analytical and data skills, with a background in both prototyping and building scalable systems that can swiftly detect emerging threats, process vast amounts of information, and deliver insights to stakeholders. We value professionals with outstanding communication skills, a commitment to continuous learning, and who are dedicated to promoting the responsible use of AI. 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. In this role, you will: Prototype, build, and maintain at-scale intelligence systems that detect, triage, and monitor targeted signals from both open-source and internal data Analyze requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions that address

About the Team The Core Services team is responsible for building and managing foundational services. It acts as the bridge between core infrastructure (e.g. compute, storage, networking) and product engineering teams, and enables product teams to move fast, build reliably, and scale efficiently. About the Role As a software engineer in the core services team, you will design and operate critical backend platforms such as caching systems, workflow orchestration, metadata stores, and file services. You’ll focus on building highly reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone of our products. We’re looking for people who are passionate about building infrastructure that empowers product teams, love working on distributed systems challenges, and enjoy creating well-designed APIs and abstractions that accelerate development. 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. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain shared infrastructure services such as caching layers, workflow orchestration (Temporal), metadata stores, and file storage services. Collaborate with product teams to provide scalable, reliable primitives that abstract the complexities of distributed systems. Improve performance, resilience, and scalability of core services that power customer-facing applications. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with distributed systems, caching infrastructure (e.g., Redis, Memcached), metadata storage (e.g., FoundationDB), or workflow orchestration (e.g., Temporal, Cadence). Have experience running containerized services in cloud environments and integrating them into automated build/test/release (CI/CD) workflows. Understand trade-offs in consistency models, replication strategies, and performance optimization in multi-region systems. Excel at communication and collaboration with cross-functional teams, and are obsesse

About the Team The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design, build, and operate some of the largest distributed data systems in the world. You will be responsible for the end-to-end stack to deliver and consume top-quality data for robotics training at exabyte-scale. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI’s rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable, large-scale systems in high-stakes environments. 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. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure such as exabyte-scale distributed data processing, data selection, automated labeling, and training data loaders. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. Deliver the best possible data for training robotics models. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented a

About the Team The Fleet team builds core components to enable productive research from small to state of the art scale across OpenAI, with the goal of accelerating progress towards AGI. We frequently collaborate with other teams to speed up the development of new state-of-the-art capabilities. About the Role As we scale up with more researchers and engineers joining OpenAI, we seek a pragmatic and passionate engineer with a strong focus on the development experience for both engineers and scientists. In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining systems that allow our research + engineering organization to iteratively develop, test, and deploy new features reliably, with high velocity, and with a frictionless and fast development cycle. You will help oversee and drive to the vision of how we should build, test and deploy software. You will drive the design of our continuous integration pipelines, testing infrastructure, training and support around our build system. Our current environment relies heavily on Python, Rust, and C++, which you will take ownership of and strive to transform into a state of the art development experience for research. Ultimately, your role will be to provide the necessary tools and metrics to support our fast-paced culture and ensure a stable, scalable platform for growth, while also fostering a seamless and low friction experience for OpenAI’s research. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. For a San Francisco role, 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 supported large monorepo development and deployment before Are a proficient Python programmer working in large monorepos Are proficient with Docker and Kubernetes Experienced in CI/CD 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 boun

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role As a Hardware Chips Programs Manager at OpenAI, you will help bring our chips hardware roadmap to life, navigating an array of technical and partnership challenges. We’re looking for people excited to push the frontiers of computing by navigating technical explorations and are passionate about building. 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. In this role, you will: Manage the design and implementation planning of our ML acceleration hardware, working across technical, cross-functional and external stakeholders Lead planning and scheduling of chip hardware designs with our strategic partners and vendors Coordinate and marshal internal resources and communication for efficient interaction with partners and vendors. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience as a technical program manager for data center hardware products (server, GPU, TPU, networking, storage and so on) Know the whole end-to-end system program management from concept, design, production, deployment into the data center Have some experience with System SW programs through NPI Want to help design some of the world’s largest supercomputing systems, working at the edge of complex hardware challenges Enjoy working with and enabling world-class AI Researchers and Engineers Are passionate about the technical program function, and enjoy independently owning and delivering on your tea

About the Team Training Runtime designs the core distributed machine-learning training runtime that powers everything from early research experiments to frontier-scale model runs. With a dual mandate to accelerate researchers and enable frontier scale, we’re building a unified, modular runtime that meets researchers where they are and moves with them up the scaling curve. Our work focuses on three pillars: high-performance, asynchronous, zero-copy tensor and optimizer-state-aware data movement; performant, high-uptime, fault-tolerant training frameworks (training loop, state management, resilient checkpointing, deterministic orchestration, and observability); and distributed process management for long-lived, job-specific and user-provided processes. We integrate proven large-scale capabilities into a composable, developer-facing runtime so teams can iterate quickly and run reliably at any scale, partnering closely with model-stack, research, and platform teams. Success for us is measured by raising both training throughput (how fast models train) and researcher throughput (how fast ideas become experiments and products). About the Role As a Training Performance Engineer, you’ll drive efficiency improvements across our distributed training stack. You’ll analyze large-scale training runs, identify utilization gaps, and design optimizations that push the boundaries of throughput and uptime. This role blends deep systems understanding with practical performance engineering — analyzing GPU kernel performance, collective communication throughput, investigating I/O bottlenecks, and sharding our models so we can train them at massive scale. You’ll help ensure that our clusters are running at peak performance, enabling OpenAI to train larger, more capable models with the same compute budget. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Profil

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. A key part of achieving that mission is training models that deeply understand and reflect human preferences — the Human Data team is at the heart of that effort. The Human Data engineering team creates the systems that enable scalable, high-quality human feedback. These systems are essential to how OpenAI trains and improves its most advanced models. Engineers on this team collaborate closely with world-class researchers to bring alignment techniques to life — from experimental ideas to production-ready feedback loops. About the Role We’re looking for software engineers to join the Human Data team and build the platforms, prototypes, tools, and infrastructure that power how our AI models are trained, aligned, and evaluated. You’ll partner with researchers and cross-functional teams to bring alignment ideas to life, influence future model training, and shape how models interact with the real world. We’re looking for people who are excited by technical ownership, enjoy working across the stack, and are eager to solve ambiguous problems in a high-impact, fast-paced environment. 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. In this role, you will: Build and maintain robust full-stack systems for feedback collection, data labeling, and evaluation pipelines, while maintaining high levels of security. Translate experimental alignment research into scalable production infrastructure, including inference and model training stacks. Design and iterate on user-facing tools and backend services to support high-quality data workflows Partner with researchers, engineers, and program leads to shape feedback loops and model interaction paradigms Drive infrastructure improvements that enable faster iteration and scaling across OpenAI’s frontier models, from internal r

About the team The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications for developers and startups. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to late-stage startups. About the Role We are seeking a technically proficient, business-minded Applied AI Engineer to help push the frontier of advanced AI with our strategic startup customers. You'll work with some of the most exciting AI startups in the world, guiding them through ideation, development, delivery, and scaling to accelerate and maximize the value of what they build on our platform. You will have the opportunity to work on the most novel and creative use cases being built on our API, serving as a critical partner in collecting and delivering high-fidelity product and model feedback internally. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Applied Research, and Product teams, and you will report to the Startups Applied AI Lead. This role is based in our San Francisco or New York offices. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Partner closely with strategic startup customers as their technical thought partner to build novel applications on our API, helping them rapidly move from ideation to scale. Provide proactive guidance to maximize business impact and accelerate application development. Experiment and prototype alongside customers, demonstrating practical use cases. Contribute to open-source resources and scale the function by sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing useful resources. Synthesize and deliver valuable feedback to the Product and Research

About the Team The Strategic Finance team at OpenAI plays a critical role in shaping the company’s long-term trajectory. We partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Go-To-Market teams to inform high-stakes decisions through rigorous data science and economic modeling. As part of our expanding Data Science function, we’re building a best-in-class Forecasting capability to drive real-time, data-driven decision-making across user growth, revenue, compute infrastructure, and more. We are developing scalable forecasting infrastructure to help us understand and anticipate business dynamics in an increasingly complex, usage-based world. Our models are foundational to planning, pricing, operational efficiency, and growth strategy - supporting key investment decisions and unlocking OpenAI’s full potential. About the Role We’re looking for a senior Machine Learning Data Scientist to lead our forecasting initiatives. You’ll be one of the founding members of the Forecasting pillar within Strategic Finance Data Science, responsible for building and scaling robust, interpretable, and production-ready forecasting systems. Your models will power critical business decisions by predicting core metrics such as DAU/WAU, revenue, LTV, compute consumption, and profitability. This is a highly cross-functional role, requiring technical excellence, strong product intuition, and business acumen. You’ll collaborate with product managers, researchers, engineers, and finance leaders to operationalize forecasting insights, influence company-wide strategy, and build foundational forecasting capabilities at OpenAI. 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. In this role, you will: Build statistical and machine learning models to solve forecasting needs across product, finance, infrastructure, and GTM domains. Own the end-to-end modeling lifecycle , including scoping, feature engineerin

About the Team: OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Our Stargate program develops and deploys massive, state-of-the-art data center campuses in partnership with industry leaders today—and through future OpenAI infrastructure projects tomorrow. We design for scale, speed, and reliability, and we need experienced technicians who can translate network blueprints into physical reality. About the Role: We are seeking a Senior Data Center Networking Technician who thrives in fast-moving build environments and is eager to roll up their sleeves during active datacenter deployments. Your first assignment will focus on the physical bring-up of network infrastructure at a large partner-operated campus, collaborating with partner teams and their delivery vendors to achieve agreed performance and reliability targets. As that campus reaches steady state, you will transition to lead network deployment for future OpenAI data center projects, defining standards and guiding implementation across multiple locations. Candidates must be able to sit onsite in Abilene, Texas 5 days per week Key Responsibilities Serve as OpenAI’s technical lead technician during the current campus build, partnering with internal engineers and external contractors on design reviews, installation plans, and acceptance criteria. Spend significant time on the data-center floor performing inspections, assisting with cable routing/termination when needed, conducting fiber testing (OTDR, power levels, continuity), and resolving installation challenges in real time. Troubleshoot and optimize cabling routes, patching, and equipment turn-up to ensure clean, reliable handoff to network operations. Contribute to design discussions and peer reviews for structured cabling and physical network layouts, providing practical field feedback to engineering teams. Develop repeatable engineering standards, as-built do

About the Team OpenAI’s Platform team powers how millions of developers and enterprises build with our models. We provide APIs and agentic solutions used by global startups and fortune 500s. We work closely with product, engineering, design, and go-to-market to build a world-class platform that pushes the frontier of AI capabilities. About the Role As a Data Scientist on the Platform team, you will drive a data-driven culture for OpenAI’s API and B2B solutions. You’ll define the metrics that matter for developer success and enterprise value, measure the impact of new models and features, and partner with PMs and engineers to improve model quality, reliability, latency, and cost. Your work will shape how thousands of products adopt agentic AI. 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. In this role, you will Embed with the Platform product team as a trusted partner, uncovering ways to improve developer experience, reliability, and usage growth Define north-star metrics across the developer funnel (activation, retention, growth), as well as latency/cost guardrails for new features and models Design and interpret A/B tests and controlled rollouts (e.g., new model versions, pricing/limits, new API features, new B2B products) Build source-of-truth dashboards and self-serve data tools for product, engineering, and go-to-market teams Translate product learnings into actionable feedback for Research (e.g., failure modes, eval gaps, model response quality) You might thrive in this role if you have 5+ years in a quantitative role in ambiguous, high-growth environments (platforms, APIs, or B2B products a plus) Depth in SQL and Python, with a track record proposing, designing, and running rigorous experiments Experience defining and operationalizing metrics from scratch (including reliability/latency/cost and safety) Strong cross-functional communication with PMs, enginee

About the Team The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. You’ll join the team responsible for running the core infrastructure that supports products like ChatGPT and the API. The systems we support include our kubernetes clusters, infrastructure deployment, our networking stack, cloud abstractions, and more. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role The cloud infrastructure team builds and maintains infrastructure abstractions allowing OpenAI to ship products quickly and scalably. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Design and build the development and production platforms that power our products, enabling reliability and security at scale Ensure our infrastructure can scale to the next order of magnitude Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years building core infrastructure Have experience operating orchestration systems such as Kubernetes at scale Have experience building abstractions over cloud platforms Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. 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 depl