Program Manager, People Innovation Labs

About the Team At OpenAI, we are building the connective tissue between our mission and our people. People Innovation Labs is a fast-moving engineering team embedded in the People organization, focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work. We are not a typical internal tools team. From recruiting to culture, we design and build systems that give the People Team a significant edge by infusing OpenAI’s models and first-principles thinking into how we operate. Our work spans greenfield 0→1 products like OpenHouse (our internal knowledge hub), AI-powered automations, performance and growth systems, and scalable recruiting infrastructure. We operate in a highly cross-functional environment, partnering closely with HR, Recruiting, Finance, Legal, IT, Security, and executive stakeholders. About the Role We’re looking for a Program Manager to own execution, coordination, and delivery across People Innovation Labs’ most complex and cross-cutting initiatives. This role is distinct from the Product Manager role and is focused on how work gets done rather than what we build. As a Program Manager, you will be responsible for translating product strategy into executable plans, managing dependencies across teams and systems, and ensuring that high-stakes initiatives land predictably and cleanly in a fast-growing, high-context environment. You will partner closely with Product Management, Engineering, Design, and People stakeholders to drive clarity, accountability, and momentum across the portfolio. This role is ideal for someone who excels at orchestrating work across many teams, navigating ambiguity and organizational complexity, and creating the operating structure that allows product and engineering teams to move quickly without chaos. In this role, you will: - Own program execution across multiple People Innovation Labs initiatives, ensuring clear plans, milestones, owners, and timelines - Drive cross-functional alignment across People, Recruiting, HRBPs, Finance, Legal, IT, Security, and Engineering partners - Manage dependencies and sequencing across systems (e.g., HRIS, ATS, permissions, data pipelines, rollout infrastructure) - Identify risks, bottlenecks, and tradeoffs early, and proactively surface and resolve them - Establish and maintain operating cadence for key initiatives, including status updates, reviews, launch readiness, and retrospectives - Create clear, actionable documentation such as program plans, decision logs, rollout plans, and exec updates - Support product launches by coordinating readiness across training, comms, support, data, and operational workflows - Track delivery health and operational success metrics (e.g., timelines, adoption readiness, launch quality, post-launch issues) - Partner with Product Managers to translate product roadmaps into executable delivery plans without owning product direction or requirements You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 5+ years of experience as a Program Manager, Technical Program Manager, or in a similar execution-focused role - Are exceptionally strong at turning ambiguous, multi-stakeholder work into clear plans and accountable execution - Communicate crisply and confidently across a wide range of audiences, including senior leaders - Enjoy operating at the intersection of product, engineering, and business operations - Are comfortable managing complexity across multiple systems, teams, and timelines - Know how to introduce structure and rigor without creating unnecessary process or slowing teams down - Have experience supporting launches of operationally intensive products or platforms - Are energized by fast-moving environments and motivated by helping teams deliver high-impact work reliably 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. 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