Program Manager, Automation and Optimization

About the Team

At OpenAI, we are dedicated to building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) to benefit all of humanity. Our mission attracts the world's top talent in science, engineering, and business to address one of the most ambitious challenges of our times.

Recruiting Operations is the backbone of this effort - we design, scale, and continuously improve the systems that enable our recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators to deliver world-class candidate experiences while meeting the company's high hiring bar. We partner closely with our People Innovation Labs team, who build custom AI-first tooling, and with our Recruiting Enablement Program Manager, who ensures adoption and training.

This role will sit in Recruiting Operations, focusing on automation, workflow optimization, and experimentation inside recruiting so our team feels like they are truly working in the future. You'll collaborate with a peer Program Manager in this space, dividing ownership of the automation roadmap and scaling impact together.

About the Role

As a Recruiting Optimization & Automation Program Manager, you will own and co-drive the automation roadmap for the recruiting function. You'll translate recruiter and coordinator pain points into automation opportunities, partner with People Innovation Labs to build complex solutions, and, when appropriate, directly build and ship lightweight workflows yourself.

This role is perfect for someone who thrives at the intersection of recruiting operations, product thinking, and hands-on building. You will ensure OpenAI's recruiting engine operates more efficiently and intelligently each quarter, with less manual friction and more leverage for recruiters.

You'll be responsible for:

• Co-owning the recruiting automation roadmap: Partner with your peer Program Manager to prioritize high-impact automation opportunities across sourcing, interviewing, offers, and onboarding.

• Piloting and scaling AI-first workflows: Run experiments with new tools and agents, measure ROI, and decide when to expand or sunset.

• Building when needed: Create lightweight automations and dashboards yourself (e.g., Airtable automations, Ashby workflows, Snowflake SQL queries, ChatGPT prompts).

• Bridging recruiting & People Innovation Labs: Translate recruiter needs into requirements for custom builds and ensure smooth integration into daily workflows.

• Streamlining processes across tools: Optimize usage of Ashby, Juicebox, Airtable, Snowflake, Brighthire, ChatGPT, and custom tooling through automations and connective workflows.

• Measuring & reporting impact: Define success metrics (hours saved, adoption rates, cycle time reductions) and report outcomes to Recruiting leadership.

• Driving adoption in partnership with Enablement: Ensure new workflows land well with recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators.

• Safeguarding compliance & quality: Ensure automations support legal, ethical, and organizational standards.

We're seeking:

• Recruiting systems fluency: 5-7+ years in Recruiting Operations, HR Tech, or adjacent roles; expertise with ATS/CRM systems (Ashby strongly preferred).

• Hands-on builder mindset: Comfortable rolling up your sleeves to ship automations directly (Zapier, Airtable scripting, Ashby automations, SQL queries, ChatGPT prompting).

• Program management excellence: Proven success in managing cross-functional projects and driving change adoption.

• Analytical ability: Strong proficiency with Google Sheets/Excel; SQL/Snowflake or BI experience a plus.

• AI & automation literacy: Familiar with AI tools and how they can be applied in recruiting workflows.

• Collaboration & influence skills: Able to work closely with technical partners (People Innovation Labs), fellow PMs, and business users.

• Bias for experimentation: Thrives on testing new ideas, iterating quickly, and making data-driven decisions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Want to design and build the future of recruiting work.

• Love to both shape strategy and ship practical solutions with your own hands.

• Get energy from removing manual work and creating leverage for teams.

• See yourself as a translator between recruiters and engineers.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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: $190K - $240K