Workforce Planning Manager

ABOUT THE ROLE

OpenAI is scaling rapidly, and headcount is our most critical investment. We are hiring our first Workforce Planning Manager to build the foundation of how we plan, track, and forecast our growth.

This is a cross-functional leadership role that will sit in Recruiting Operations and serve as the bridge across Finance, Recruiting, People Ops, and Real Estate & Workplace Services. You will design and operationalize the systems that reconcile financial plans with hiring priorities, align recruiting capacity with business needs, and forecast the real estate footprint required to support our teams.

As our first dedicated hire, you will stand up a new capability inside OpenAI — one that will grow into a Workforce Planning Center of Excellence (COE). You’ll be both a strategic partner to leadership and a hands-on builder of the infrastructure, processes, and reporting that allow us to scale responsibly.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Build Workforce Planning as a Function

- Establish the frameworks, governance, and reporting that become the backbone of headcount planning at OpenAI.

- Create consistent definitions and standards for headcount across the company.

- Lay the groundwork for a future Workforce Planning COE.

- Headcount Planning & Strategy

- Partner with Finance to translate business goals into headcount budgets and reconciliations.

- Align hiring priorities with organizational strategy, ensuring clarity on sequencing and trade-offs.

- Play a central role in quarterly and annual planning cycles, partnering with Finance and Leadership to ensure headcount decisions are aligned with strategic priorities and trade-offs are clearly surfaced.

- Recruiting Supply & Demand Alignment

- Model recruiting capacity vs. demand to inform which roles to open and when.

- Partner with Recruiting Leadership to ensure hiring prioritization matches funnel realities.

- Provide executive visibility into supply/demand health with clear dashboards.

- Data Integration & Insights

- Integrate and reconcile data across Finance (Anaplan), Recruiting (Ashby), People Ops (Workday), and Real Estate (occupancy dashboards).

- Ensure a single source of truth for headcount, hiring progress, and future forecasts.

- Build reporting that ties hiring outcomes to financial plan and space requirements.

- Translate data into actionable insights for leadership, surfacing trade-offs between budget, recruiting capacity, and real estate needs.

- Forecasting & Scenario Planning

- Build models for headcount growth, attrition, and hiring pace.

- Partner with Real Estate & Workplace Services to forecast space needs under different scenarios.

- Deliver scenario analyses to inform executive decision-making.

- Cross-Functional Leadership

- Act as the connective tissue between Finance, Recruiting, People Ops, and Real Estate.

- Influence senior stakeholders with insights grounded in data.

- Anticipate and surface trade-offs between budget, hiring capacity, and organizational needs.

ABOUT YOU

- 7–10+ years in workforce planning, people analytics, FP&A, or strategic operations, ideally in a fast-scaling tech environment.

- Proven experience building new processes, systems, or functions from scratch.

- Strong analytical toolkit; comfortable working across HRIS, ATS, financial planning, and real estate systems (Workday, Ashby, Anaplan, or equivalents).

- A track record of driving alignment across executive-level stakeholders.

- Able to operate at two altitudes: strategic partner to leadership and hands-on builder of infrastructure.

- Excited by the opportunity to create a new function that will scale with the company.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

This is a rare opportunity to start a new capability inside OpenAI. Getting headcount right is critical to our mission. By building the Workforce Planning & Analytics function, you’ll ensure OpenAI grows with clarity, efficiency, and foresight.

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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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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.