---
title: 'Technical Program Manager, Developer Experience at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-developer-experience-openai-san-francisco-935ez6mvdyfa'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-17'
---

# Technical Program Manager, Developer Experience at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $257k–$445k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-02
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ad958934-fd89-4033-8b13-1a4871d8073c

## Job description

## 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. The ChatGPT engineering org builds and operates the systems that bring product improvements to users across backend services, web, mobile, and desktop platforms. The Developer Velocity team partners with product engineering, platform, infrastructure, reliability, engineering acceleration, and observability teams to make everyday development faster and releases safer, more predictable, and easier to operate.

## About the Role

We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to improve developer velocity and deployment excellence across ChatGPT. You will lead durable improvements to local development, CI, testing, build systems, release trains, progressive rollout, and post-deployment validation. You will identify the highest-leverage sources of engineering friction, align teams around shared standards and metrics, and drive adoption of tooling and workflows that improve both speed and reliability. This role combines systems thinking, technical program leadership, and hands-on operating rigor across a broad engineering surface. 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:

- Own the cross-functional roadmap for improving local development, CI, testing, build workflows, and release infrastructure.
- Create a durable intake and prioritization mechanism for developer friction, using evidence to focus teams on the highest-impact improvements.
- Lead programs that improve deployment speed and safety, including pre-merge confidence, progressive rollout, release guardrails, rollback readiness, and post-deploy validation.
- Improve the reliability and predictability of release trains across ChatGPT backend services, web, mobile, and desktop platforms.
- Partner with platform, infrastructure, reliability, engineering acceleration, and observability teams to reduce deployment-related incidents and regressions.
- Increase visibility into what is shipping when, and make cross-platform dependencies and launch risks clear to engineers, product managers, and launch owners.
- Define and operationalize metrics for developer productivity, build and test health, deployment throughput, release reliability, and engineering velocity.
- Drive adoption of automation, observability, release orchestration, and scalable developer tooling, with clear ownership and sustained operating cadences.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have led complex technical programs spanning developer infrastructure, CI/CD, build and test systems, release engineering, or distributed systems.
- Can engage deeply with engineers on workflow architecture, deployment systems, rollout risk, observability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Have delivered measurable improvements in developer velocity, deployment throughput, release reliability, or engineering efficiency.
- Know how to turn fragmented ownership and recurring manual work into durable mechanisms, standards, and tooling with strong adoption.
- Use data and qualitative evidence to prioritize work, define useful metrics, and distinguish real productivity gains from local optimization.
- Lead effectively across platform and product teams, resolve ambiguity, and keep multi-team execution moving without direct authority.
- Use metrics to guide decisions, identify bottlenecks, and demonstrate measurable improvements in throughput, predictability, or reliability.
- Communicate with precision and can move comfortably between technical detail, operational execution, and executive-level decisions.
- Thrive in ambiguous, scaling environments and can bring order to complex cross-functional work without losing pace.
- Care about OpenAI's mission and about expanding responsible access to advanced AI systems.

## 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/)

## Other roles at OpenAI

- [Counsel, Commercial](https://feeny.ai/job/counsel-commercial-openai-san-francisco-4gcqbn7kg037) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineer, Compute Foundations](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-compute-foundations-openai-san-francisco-dwt3p53y2ymc) — San Francisco, CA
- [Field Enablement Lead, Technical Success](https://feeny.ai/job/field-enablement-lead-technical-success-openai-san-francisco-2vvwqs7446fx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Mechanical Engineer, Hardware Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/mechanical-engineer-hardware-systems-openai-san-francisco-p8pb07qq2bdg) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategy & Operations, Germany](https://feeny.ai/job/strategy-operations-germany-openai-munich-hvpp5m48ncah) — Munich, Germany
- [Order to Cash Operations Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/order-to-cash-operations-lead-openai-dublin-z68ataz0f5rg) — Dublin, Ireland
- [Deal Operations, APAC](https://feeny.ai/job/deal-operations-apac-openai-singapore-bbcjwanzdg65) — Singapore
- [Editor](https://feeny.ai/job/editor-openai-united-states-7b8pj712yacj) — United States
- [Applied AI Architect, Healthcare & Life Sciences](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-architect-healthcare-life-sciences-openai-san-francisco-j8gh1pxe9xgj) — San Francisco, CA
- [Creative Operations Lead, Business Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-operations-lead-business-marketing-openai-san-francisco-ys1nd7eqm42p) — San Francisco, CA