This Technical Program Manager, Foundations Data and Operations job is with OpenAI in California. It is a hybrid full-time role, so plan on splitting your week between home and the office. The salary range published with the job is $207,000 to $285,000 a year.
Here is the role as OpenAI describes it.
The Search research team focuses on building the systems that help AI systems find, retrieve, and use information from the world. We aim to make answers more useful and grounded for more than a billion ChatGPT users.
We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager to lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search. You’ll partner closely with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans, resolve dependencies, and move complex technical work forward.
This role combines technical depth, product judgment, and hands-on execution. You’ll work across retrieval, indexing, and model improvements, while collaborating with policy, legal, and external data partners. You’ll help teams make informed tradeoffs and build practical ways of working that support a fast-moving research environment.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA.
Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure.
Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs.
Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost.
Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust.
Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.
Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.
Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.
Have substantial technical experience and a record of delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large technical stack.
Have worked on search, information retrieval, indexing, or similarly complex systems. Direct experience with consumer or enterprise search products is especially valuable.
Can understand technical architectures and tradeoffs, ask useful questions, and communicate effectively with both engineers and researchers.
Bring clarity to ambiguous research problems and adapt plans as teams learn, while maintaining ownership and momentum.
Combine product judgment with program discipline, connecting technical decisions to the quality of the user experience.
Are resourceful and hands-on, comfortable moving between program strategy and the details needed to unblock execution.
Build trust across functions, communicate clearly, and influence decisions across teams with different priorities.
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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .
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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.
OpenAI advertises $207,000 to $285,000 a year for this role.
It is hybrid. You would work partly from home and partly from the office in California.
Use the apply button on this page. It takes you to OpenAI's own application form, so your CV goes directly to their hiring team.
OpenAI published the role on September 1, 2026. We check the employer's job board every day and take this page down when the role closes, so if you can read it, the job was still listed at our last check.
Source: OpenAI careers page (jobs.ashbyhq.com). Applications go straight to the employer. We check the listing daily and remove it once it closes.
OpenAI publishes its open roles on its own careers board. This page collects the OpenAI jobs that are live right now. Each listing links to OpenAI's application form, and we remove a listing once the employer closes it.
Industry: Technology
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