--- title: 'Technical Program Manager, Applied API & Product at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-applied-api-product-openai-san-francisco-97yrny068hrt' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-15' --- # Technical Program Manager, Applied API & Product at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $207k–$445k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-07-07 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/cffa3a8d-918a-4e91-a1c6-3fa84a454408 ## Job description Technical Program Manager – Applied Product & Platform ## About the Team The Product & Platform teams at OpenAI are responsible for delivering the company’s most impactful offerings—such as ChatGPT, our API platform, and new enterprise capabilities—to a global and diverse customer base. These systems must perform at scale and deliver exceptional experiences to developers, consumers, and businesses alike. Technical Program Managers at OpenAI play a key leadership role in scaling these efforts, partnering deeply with product, engineering, design, and go-to-market teams to bring ambitious ideas to life and ensure clarity and discipline in execution. ## About the Role We’re seeking a Technical Program Manager to drive complex, large-scale product and platform initiatives across ChatGPT, API, and related surfaces. This role sits at the intersection of technical strategy and execution. You’ll be responsible for translating product vision into actionable plans, shaping interfaces and experiences from both consumer and developer perspectives, and ensuring successful delivery across web, mobile, and platform layers. You’ll bring deep technical fluency, product sense, and a strong execution track record. You’re comfortable managing ambiguity, influencing architectural direction, advocating for developers, and leading cross-functional delivery with discipline and empathy. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid – 3 days/week in-office) In this role, you will: - Collaborate with product, engineering, and design to shape roadmaps, technical strategies, and long-term platform direction. - Translate product vision into clear, scalable technical execution plans, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform evolution. - Lead end-to-end execution of cross-functional product and platform programs—from planning through launch and iteration. - Own timelines, milestones, dependency management, risk mitigation, and accountability across teams. - Partner with engineering teams to influence architectural decisions and interface definitions for public and internal APIs. - Understand full-stack systems across client (web, mobile) and server (API, back-end) surfaces to ensure holistic and performant solutions. - Serve as a central coordination point across product, design, engineering, legal, policy, and go-to-market stakeholders. - Ensure alignment on priorities and unblock teams through structured execution and consistent communication. - Deliver crisp and clear updates to technical and executive stakeholders on program health, risks, and tradeoffs. - Influence product and leadership decisions by representing developer and customer perspectives grounded in deep context. - Identify systemic inefficiencies and propose new tools or processes to improve product delivery and cross-team velocity. - Leverage data and AI-powered internal tooling to track progress, surface gaps, and optimize product and developer experiences. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 10–15+ years of experience driving high-impact technical programs in product and platform domains. - Have strong technical acumen across front-end/client technologies, API development, and scalable systems architecture. - Have successfully delivered developer-facing tools or platforms and can advocate for the end-user and developer experience. - Bring excellent program management discipline—comfortable managing multiple concurrent efforts, leading complex execution, and bringing clarity to ambiguity. - Demonstrate product intuition and can connect user needs to technical tradeoffs and platform decisions. - Are a highly structured and empathetic communicator who fosters alignment and moves cross-functional teams forward. - Are curious, hands-on, and thrive in a fast-moving environment with high trust and high standards. ## 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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