--- title: 'Senior Technical Recruiter at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-technical-recruiter-openai-united-states-9as2z2tnv7yh' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Senior Technical Recruiter at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** United States - **Compensation:** $172k–$295k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-09-24 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/72bbf10a-5300-4aa6-8bf9-38cb2a60811a ## Job description ## About the Team OpenAI’s Recruiting team helps bring together the people who advance our mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We partner closely with leaders across the company to identify exceptional talent, build thoughtful hiring processes, and deliver an outstanding candidate experience. This role supports Applied Foundations, partnering with engineering leaders to hire the managers and senior leaders who will help build and scale OpenAI’s foundational engineering capabilities. ## About the Role We’re looking for an experienced technical recruiter with a strong track record of hiring engineering leaders. You’ll own leadership searches from initial role definition and talent mapping through assessment, offer negotiation, and close. You’ll serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders, helping clarify what each role requires, understand the talent market, and make thoughtful hiring decisions. You’ll bring the judgment to navigate ambiguous searches, the credibility to engage accomplished engineering leaders, and the persistence to build relationships well before someone is ready to make a move. Experience in executive search or an in-house leadership recruiting function is particularly valuable. You should be equally comfortable shaping a search strategy and personally doing the work to deliver a successful hire. In this role, you will: - Lead full-cycle searches for senior engineering leaders across Applied Foundations. - Partner with hiring leaders to define role scope, leadership expectations, technical requirements, and the outcomes a successful hire will deliver. - Develop talent maps and targeted search strategies, combining direct sourcing, referrals, market research, and long-term relationship building. - Engage passive leadership candidates through thoughtful outreach and substantive conversations about their experience, motivations, and potential impact at OpenAI. - Partner with hiring teams to assess leadership capabilities, including building teams, developing managers, setting technical direction, and leading through change. - Advise senior stakeholders using market intelligence and search evidence, including when to revisit requirements, broaden a talent pool, or adjust the hiring approach. - Own complex closing strategies, partnering with hiring leaders and compensation colleagues to navigate competing opportunities, equity considerations, counteroffers, and career decisions. - Maintain a rigorous operating rhythm across searches, communicating progress, surfacing risks early, and delivering a consistent, thoughtful candidate experience. - Strengthen leadership recruiting practices by sharing insights, improving assessment approaches, and helping teammates navigate challenging searches. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring substantial technical recruiting experience, with a demonstrated track record of personally owning and closing engineering leadership searches. - Have experience in executive search, in-house leadership recruiting, or a comparable environment requiring targeted research, senior stakeholder partnership, and discretion. - Can evaluate leadership scope beyond titles and partner with hiring managers to distinguish technical expertise, people leadership, and organizational impact. - Build credibility with senior engineering leaders and offer clear recommendations, including constructive pushback when needed. - Have successfully managed complex offers and understand how compensation, role scope, organizational context, and personal motivations influence a leadership candidate’s decision. - Combine strategic judgment with strong sourcing and execution skills, taking ownership from search kickoff through close. - Learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and adapt effectively as priorities or role requirements evolve. - Communicate clearly, handle sensitive information thoughtfully, and approach feedback with humility and a willingness to update your perspective. ## 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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