Technical Program Manager, Applied Research

About the Team

This TPM role sits within the OAI for Science org, specifically on the Applied Research team. The broader org focuses on harnessing frontier AI models to transform scientific, strategic, economically important domains. They build partnerships with established industry leaders to solve distribution challenges and help bring AI innovation to these spaces. The team operates like a startup within OpenAI, with unmatched research depth, compute, and real-world impact.

About the Role

Technical Program Managers at OpenAI place heavy emphasis on “technical” ability, not just program leadership. You will be expected to own end-to-end program leadership for complex, highly technical research initiatives that turn ambiguous research goals into measurable technical outcomes. You will drive execution across Research, Infrastructure, Data/Compliance, Forward Deployed Engineering, Customer Success, and external partners, ensuring milestones, governance, and delivery discipline without compromising integrity, security, or safety.

• In this role, you will:

• Create and own the technical roadmap with the tech lead.

• Convert ambiguity into executable specs: task definitions, grading/eval methodology, baselines, acceptance thresholds, and go/no-go gates.

• Own the cross-stack critical path: data readiness, infra readiness, training loop readiness, and eval readiness.

• Align partners technically: shared roadmaps, shared milestones/definitions of success, and escalation paths when constraints block progress.

• Partner with research and engineering leads to define technical requirements, integration plans, and evaluation strategy.

• Operationalize training runs: runbooks, dashboards, triage paths, postmortems, and recurring-failure elimination via automation.

• Align partner incentives with OpenAI priorities.

• Maintain executive-level clarity on partnership health, risks, and opportunities.

• Drive decision-making without formal authority through structured narratives, options framing, and tradeoff clarity.

• Produce high-quality artifacts: program docs, executive memos, runbooks, dashboards, and partner-facing updates.

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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