---
title: 'Agent Standards Specialist, Global Affairs at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/agent-standards-specialist-global-affairs-openai-washington-fqnaqxfafbh4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Agent Standards Specialist, Global Affairs at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** Washington, DC
- **Compensation:** $171k–$280k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-04
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/80f0deef-7c66-4545-91eb-f43a1481f997

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires effective engagement with public policy stakeholders and the broader community impacted by AI. Accordingly, our Global Affairs team builds authentic, collaborative relationships with public officials and the broader AI policymaking community to inform and support our shared work in these domains. We ensure that insights from policymakers inform our work and – in collaboration with our colleagues and external stakeholders – seek to shape policy so that it aligns with and supports our mission.

## About the Role

As AI agents move from answering questions to taking action across the internet, the standards that govern identity, delegated authority, discovery, communications, agentic-commerce and payment interfaces, agent-facing web access, agent-specific provenance, and auditability will determine whether agents can operate safely, interoperably, and with clear accountability. OpenAI is looking for an Agent Standards Manager to lead execution of our external technical standards strategy for a defined set of agent standards workstreams. This role will work closely with Agent Security, Applied and Platform teams, Product, Legal, GRC, Global Affairs, and GTM to turn OpenAI’s technical architecture and controls into credible specifications, protocol profiles, assurance criteria, and implementation guidance—and to bring emerging external requirements back into product and security roadmaps before they become blockers. The positions developed here are technical standards positions, not broad public-policy positions. This is a builder’s role as much as an external-facing role. You will execute a prioritized standards plan, author and negotiate protocols, build coalitions, secure the right internal approvals, and represent OpenAI in assigned technical forums. You will also help create repeatable processes that let the company shape agent standards without depending on a single person or relying on technical teams to carry external standards work on top of their core jobs. The Agent Standards Manager is an integrator, not the owner of every underlying technical system. Security, Product, Engineering, and other designated technical teams retain ownership of architecture, threat models, controls, product decisions, approvals, and implementation. This role owns workstream planning, standards translation, drafting, negotiation, external representation within approved mandates, commitment traceability, and implementation handoff. In this role, you will:

- Own a focused workstream plan for core agent identity, discovery, and delegated-authorization standards, with adjacent agentic-commerce, web-access, provenance, and auditability work assigned through portfolio prioritization.
- Recommend where OpenAI should lead, shape, monitor, oppose, or decline to participate within the assigned workstream, based on technical maturity, governance quality, strategic leverage, implementation readiness, and company priorities.
- Develop technical standards positions and normative contributions that preserve distinctions among the human or service principal, agent, workload or runtime, task, session, resource, and policy decision.
- Shape requirements for scoped delegation, attenuation, step-up approval, revocation, credential custody, runtime binding, discovery, interoperability, agent-specific provenance, and auditable action trails.
- Embed with Agent Security and Applied or Platform teams to translate internal architecture and controls into technically credible specifications, profiles, white papers, and assurance evidence without overstating maturity or deployment status.
- Lead review and approval paths across Product, Security, Engineering, Legal, GRC, Global Affairs, and GTM; maintain clear mandates, red lines, owners, dependencies, and external commitments.
- Represent OpenAI in priority venues and coalitions, such as IETF and OAuth-related work, FIDO, OIDF, W3C, AAIF, and relevant NIST or ISO efforts; build trust with peer companies, standards operators, and public-sector stakeholders.
- Bring external standards intelligence back into product, security, compliance, and go-to-market decisions early enough to shape roadmaps and avoid retrofit, launch, procurement, or market-access friction.
- Contribute reusable playbooks, decision records, contribution patterns, and handoffs that reduce key-person risk across the assigned workstream.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have strong experience in technical standards, internet protocols, identity and access, security architecture, applied cryptography, or closely related product or infrastructure work.
- Have authored, edited, or materially shaped normative specifications, profiles, drafts, or conformance requirements in serious technical standards or open-source governance settings.
- Can reason clearly about OAuth and OIDC, FIDO or WebAuth, workload identity, HTTP signatures, delegated authority, credential lifecycle, revocation, provenance, and auditability; you do not need to be expert in every layer.
- Understand that agent trust is a composed stack rather than a single credential, and can separate principal, agent, runtime, task, session, resource, and policy claims.
- Can distinguish adopted standards, stable extensions, active drafts, working-group proposals, and exploratory ideas—and know how that maturity should change OpenAI’s posture.
- Earn trust with engineers and security leaders while also communicating crisply with lawyers, product leaders, executives, policymakers, and external standards participants.
- Have strong judgment in ambiguous, high-stakes environments and know when to lead, compromise, oppose, escalate, or walk away.
- Write clearly, negotiate constructively, and are comfortable representing OpenAI externally with discretion.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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