Recruiting - US - Remote, Seattle, and San Francisco
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 engineering managers and 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 clearlyation 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 the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
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.
Compensation
$172K – $295K + Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
