OpenAI Research Program Manager on OpenAI’s Governance team responsible for developing governance assessments, recommendations, and decision materials. Manage cross-team collaboration to address emerging AI risks and governance challenges.
Responsibilities
We are looking for a curious, high-agency Research Program Manager who can reason from first principles, make sense of incomplete or conflicting information, and move difficult work forward. You will help shape the substance of governance reviews, connect ideas and evidence across teams, and develop recommendations that are both well-founded and practical.
The work requires someone who can use established approaches where they fit, recognize when circumstances call for a different approach, and update their thinking as new evidence emerges. You should bring sound judgment, a willingness to experiment and learn, and the program-management discipline to turn good analysis into action.
Depending on your experience and the team’s needs, your work may focus on safety advisory and board-level oversight, deployment governance, or standards and strategic partner commitments.
Bring together technical, policy, and operational inputs to develop coherent assessments, recommendations, and decision materials for governance bodies and senior leaders.
Work through emerging or ambiguous questions, test assumptions, identify gaps or conflicting evidence, and help determine what additional analysis or decisions are needed.
Engage critically with research, evaluations, safeguards, and risk assessments, working with the relevant experts to understand what the evidence supports and where uncertainty remains.
Partner with governance-body chairs, technical leaders, and other stakeholders to shape substantive reviews, frame the questions that matter, and communicate conclusions clearly.
Translate feedback, recommendations, and decisions into concrete work with accountable owners, milestones, dependencies, and clear criteria for completion.
Drive that work forward across teams, resolve blockers, surface difficult tradeoffs, and escalate disagreements or resource gaps when needed.
Help teams understand which governance processes apply, integrate reviews into research and deployment plans, and identify changes that require further consideration.
Maintain clear records of decisions, rationale, conditions, commitments, exceptions, and unresolved questions.
Help improve governance practices, standards, and guidance as capabilities, evidence, and circumstances evolve.
