--- title: 'Counsel, Employment at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/counsel-employment-openai-san-francisco-t3dtjgn5v5kc' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Counsel, Employment at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $252k–$280k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c1241d53-0948-4f27-82fb-18192830dbf1 ## Job description ## About the Team OpenAI’s Legal team plays a crucial role in advancing our mission by tackling innovative and fundamental legal issues in AI. The team includes professionals with expertise spanning technology, AI, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation. If you’re passionate about meaningful and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. ## About the Role We are seeking an employment lawyer to help build the legal foundations for OpenAI’s next stage of growth. Working closely with our employment counsel team and colleagues across the company, you will shape practical approaches to challenging employment issues in a fast-growing AI company. This is a hands-on role for a thoughtful lawyer who enjoys variety, moves quickly, and wants to help build a strong employment legal function as the business scales. You will collaborate with experienced employment counsel on US and international employment issues, the employment aspects of mergers and acquisitions, and emerging questions about AI in the workplace. A central part of your work will be turning lessons from individual matters into practical policies, guidance, and approaches that work at scale. You will also own stakeholder relationships and manage counseling matters, exercising sound judgment and taking responsibility for outcomes. You will join a bright, collaborative team that values initiative and shared learning, with opportunities to learn from senior colleagues, deepen your expertise, and take on increasingly complex matters over time. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Help shape OpenAI’s employment legal approach as the company scales, developing practical policies, playbooks, and processes that address recurring issues and support sound, timely decisions. - Collaborate with senior employment counsel and cross-functional partners on a broad range of US employment matters, including recruiting and hiring, performance management, employee conduct, leaves of absence, accommodations, and separations. - Own designated stakeholder relationships and counseling matters, providing clear, practical advice and working independently while drawing on the team’s experience and judgment as appropriate. - Advise on international employment matters and support the employment aspects of mergers and acquisitions, including diligence and workforce integration, collaborating with local and specialist counsel as appropriate. - Partner on strategic projects and emerging legal questions, including the use of AI in employment and workplace practices. - Translate legal developments and lessons from your work into useful guidance, training, brown bags, and office hours for stakeholders across the company. - Manage employment disputes, administrative charges, and related matters in collaboration with colleagues and outside counsel, as appropriate. - Draft and negotiate employment documents and agreements, and identify practical ways to strengthen how the company handles employment matters as it grows. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 7+ years of relevant employment law experience at a law firm, an in-house legal team, or a combination of both, with a record of excellent work and increasing responsibility. - Have strong knowledge of US employment law, including California law, and sound judgment in advising on a broad range of workplace matters. - Analyze unfamiliar issues quickly and translate complex legal requirements into clear, practical recommendations that account for business needs and employee experience. - Enjoy building in a fast-growth environment: spotting gaps, developing practical solutions, and seeing them through to implementation. - Bring initiative, a strong work ethic, and consistent follow-through; manage competing priorities and deliver high-quality work at a fast pace. - Take ownership of your work, welcome feedback, and value the opportunity to learn from experienced colleagues; exercise sound judgment about when to act independently, collaborate, or escalate. - Build trusted relationships through clear communication, discretion, and empathy, and contribute to a collaborative team that shares knowledge and supports one another. - Are curious about technology, comfortable with ambiguity, and motivated by OpenAI’s mission. - Have a JD and are licensed or qualified to practice in California. ## Preferred Qualifications - Experience advising on international employment matters and the employment aspects of mergers and acquisitions. - Experience providing AI-specific employment law advice, including advising on AI enablement, automation, and employee privacy in workplace or product contexts. ## 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. 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