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Research Program Manager, Governance

OpenAI · Research

Pay
$239K – $328K • Offers Equity
Where
San Francisco
Posted
Sep 9

OpenAI’s Governance team helps shape how the company responsibly develops and deploys increasingly capable AI. We bring together technical evidence, policy, and operational perspectives to help the company address emerging risks, resolve difficult questions, and make well-supported decisions.

Our work includes shaping and improving governance practices, supporting effective oversight, developing clear assessments and recommendations, and ensuring that decisions lead to action. We work closely with research, safety, security, legal, and product teams to identify gaps, reconcile different views, and improve our approach as capabilities and circumstances change.

We are looking for a curious, high-agency Research Program Manager who can reason from first principles, make sense of incomplete or conflicting information, and move difficult work forward.

What you'd do

  • Bring together technical, policy, and operational inputs to develop coherent assessments, recommendations, and decision materials for governance bodies and senior leaders.
  • Work through emerging or ambiguous questions, test assumptions, identify gaps or conflicting evidence, and help determine what additional analysis or decisions are needed.
  • Engage critically with research, evaluations, safeguards, and risk assessments, working with the relevant experts to understand what the evidence supports and where uncertainty remains.
  • Partner with governance-body chairs, technical leaders, and other stakeholders to shape substantive reviews, frame the questions that matter, and communicate conclusions clearly.
  • Translate feedback, recommendations, and decisions into concrete work with accountable owners, milestones, dependencies, and clear criteria for completion.
  • Drive that work forward across teams, resolve blockers, surface difficult tradeoffs, and escalate disagreements or resource gaps when needed.
  • Help teams understand which governance processes apply, integrate reviews into research and deployment plans, and identify changes that require further consideration.
  • Maintain clear records of decisions, rationale, conditions, commitments, exceptions, and unresolved questions.
  • Help improve governance practices, standards, and guidance as capabilities, evidence, and circumstances evolve.
  • Build and refine practical tools, operating cadences, and sources of truth that improve the quality and pace of the work.