OpenAI The Senior Program Manager leads operational builds for device-safety and product-quality priorities for new consumer devices. This role translates ambiguous risks into practical workflows, escalation paths, and launch-readiness plans.
Responsibilities
We are looking for a senior program manager to build the safety, quality, and risk operations supporting a new category of consumer devices. You will translate ambiguous product risks and evolving requirements into practical operating models, workflows, escalation paths, launch-readiness plans, and cross-functional decision-making. This is a foundational role: the systems you build will shape how OpenAI launches, monitors, and improves a new category of consumer devices safely at scale.
The strongest candidates learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and translate product, engineering, quality, regulatory, policy, legal, and user needs into operations that work in practice.
Location / work model: San Francisco, CA; hybrid, 3 days/week in-office.
Please note: This role may involve exposure to sensitive or concerning material. Strong discretion, judgment, and resilience are essential.
Lead strategic operational builds for device-safety and product-quality priorities from problem statement to implemented operating model, including scope, owners, milestones, risks, success measures, and execution cadence.
Define intake, severity criteria, decision rights, evidence requirements, escalation paths, response standards, closure criteria, and post-incident learning for high-risk cases.
Translate product, engineering, quality, regulatory, legal, privacy, policy, support, and operational requirements into practical workflows, clear ownership, playbooks, and measurable operating standards.
Coordinate across Product, Hardware and Software Engineering, Product Safety, Product Quality, Legal, Privacy, Product Policy, Support, Logistics, vendors, and USRO to resolve dependencies and keep critical work moving. Partner with fraud, privacy, legal, and other specialized teams when device-related issues require their expertise.
Use operational data, dashboards, customer signals, product telemetry, case-management systems, AI tools, and qualitative evidence to investigate issues, measure performance, identify patterns, and improve workflows.
Drive critical escalations and cross-functional decisions to closure with clear context, accountable owners, documented decisions, and durable follow-through.
Create the mechanisms that make complex programs run well, including roadmaps, decision logs, risk registers, operating reviews, status updates, and executive communication.
Qualification
Experience with consumer hardwareExperience with device launchesExperience with vendor operationsWe are an equal opportunity employerFor additional information
Preferred
Experience with consumer hardware, connected devices, medical devices, healthcare technology, aerospace, robotics, mobility, wearables, or another technically complex or regulated physical product.
Experience with device launches, product quality, field incidents, safety-sensitive customer escalations, repairs, warranty, returns, reverse logistics, or privacy-sensitive sensor and diagnostic data.
A technical degree or equivalent experience partnering closely with hardware, software, data, or systems engineering teams.
Experience with vendor operations, quality-assurance programs, regulated-product operations, incident response, workflow automation, or AI-assisted operations.
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.
