Technical Program Manager, Foundations Data and Operations

Details

About the Team

The Search research team focuses on building systems that help AI systems find, retrieve, and use information from the world. The team aims to make answers more useful and grounded for more than a billion ChatGPT users.

About the Role

Lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search. Partner closely with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans, resolve dependencies, and move complex technical work forward.

This role combines technical depth, product judgment, and hands-on execution. The work spans retrieval, indexing, and model improvements, with collaboration across policy, legal, and external data partners. The role also involves helping teams make informed tradeoffs and building practical ways of working that support a fast-moving research environment.

The role is based in San Francisco, California.

Responsibilities

• Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure.
• Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs.
• Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost.
• Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust.
• Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.
• Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.
• Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.

Requirements

• Substantial technical experience and a record of delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large technical stack.
• Experience with search, information retrieval, indexing, or similarly complex systems. Direct experience with consumer or enterprise search products is especially valuable.
• Ability to understand technical architectures and tradeoffs, ask useful questions, and communicate effectively with engineers and researchers.
• Ability to bring clarity to ambiguous research problems and adapt plans as teams learn while maintaining ownership and momentum.
• Product judgment combined with program discipline, connecting technical decisions to the quality of the user experience.
• Resourceful and hands-on approach, with comfort moving between program strategy and the details needed to unblock execution.
• Ability to build trust across functions, communicate clearly, and influence decisions across teams with different priorities.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $207,000–$285,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.