--- title: 'Research Program Manager, Governance at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/research-program-manager-governance-openai-san-francisco-t9jpag8tgexs' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Research Program Manager, Governance at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $239k–$328k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-09-09 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/35e6355f-52fd-405e-b5b6-98b275666d39 ## Job description ## About the Team OpenAI’s Governance team helps shape how the company responsibly develops and deploys increasingly capable AI. We bring together technical evidence, policy, and operational perspectives to help the company address emerging risks, resolve difficult questions, and make well-supported decisions. Our work includes shaping and improving governance practices, supporting effective oversight, developing clear assessments and recommendations, and ensuring that decisions lead to action. We work closely with research, safety, security, legal, and product teams to identify gaps, reconcile different views, and improve our approach as capabilities and circumstances change. ## About the Role 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. In this role, you will: - 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. - Build and refine practical tools, operating cadences, and sources of truth that improve the quality and pace of the work. - Develop trusted relationships across Research, Safety Systems, Preparedness, Security, Legal, Product, leadership, and relevant external partners. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have experience leading complex, cross-functional work in a research, technology, policy, safety, security, governance, or related environment. - Take initiative, move quickly, and find practical ways forward when ownership, requirements, or the path to an answer are unclear. - Are intellectually curious and can learn unfamiliar subjects well enough to ask sharp questions, test an argument, and recognize when deeper expertise is needed. - Can synthesize complicated or conflicting information without losing important distinctions, limitations, or uncertainty. - Write clearly and precisely, particularly when explaining difficult issues and recommendations to senior decision-makers. - Bring strong program-management fundamentals and a record of turning ambiguous requests into work that gets finished. - Exercise sound judgment in sensitive situations, navigate disagreement constructively, and know when to act independently or seek a decision. - Are willing to try new approaches, learn from feedback, and change your mind when the evidence changes. - Build useful structure without adding unnecessary process. - Care deeply about the responsible development and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems. Helpful experience: - Research program management or strategy and operations in a technically complex organization. - AI safety, preparedness, model evaluations, cybersecurity, or technical risk management. - Advisory committees, board-facing work, executive decision support, or other consequential reviews. - Translating policies, standards, or governance decisions into practical requirements and programs. - Strategic partnerships or sensitive deployment 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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