Program Manager, Alignment

About the Team

The Alignment team enables OpenAI to develop and deploy increasingly capable AI, and particularly those capable of recursive self-improvement (RSI), that consistently follows human intent in complex, real-world scenarios and adversarial conditions, avoids catastrophic behavior, and remains controllable, auditable, and aligned with human values as compute and capabilities scale.

About the Role

We are looking for a program manager to support OpenAI’s alignment and safety ecosystem work through strong program execution, relationship management, and operational ownership. This person will work closely with alignment leadership to run key external-facing programs and partnerships, improve coordination across collaborators, and provide leverage on recurring operational needs in a fast-moving research environment.

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 logistics and execution for alignment events, including coordination with researchers, external participants, and internal stakeholders.

• Support third-party collaborations as an operational counterparty, including program management, contracting coordination, follow-through, and cross-functional tracking.

• Help incubate and manage external collaborations with organizations in the alignment ecosystem, including workstreams such as misalignment-related research collaborations or shared infrastructure efforts.

• Provide informed recruiting support for alignment ecosystem hiring by helping source, map, and engage trusted candidates and communities.

• Serve as the RPM counterpart for the Alignment blog, helping drive publishing operations, editorial coordination, and drafting support where needed.

• Support compute management processes for the team, including recurring coordination, tracking, and operational follow-through.

• If the pilot is successful, run a Safety Fellows program end to end, including selection process, participant support, programming, and operational management.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 4+ years of experience in program management, operations, partnerships, recruiting, or related work in research, policy, or technical environments.

• Can independently drive complex, multi-stakeholder workstreams with strong program management judgment.

• Bring familiarity with the AI safety/alignment ecosystem and can build trust with external researchers and organizations.

• Communicate clearly and write effectively.

• Are comfortable with ambiguity, can maintain momentum, and know how to close operational gaps without heavy oversight.

• Have experience supporting fellowships, research communities, or external partnerships, which is a plus.

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.

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.

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