Special Projects Lead

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

5d • Remote

About The Position

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We believe that achieving our goal requires real world deployment and iteratively updating based on what we learn. The Intelligence and Investigations team supports this by identifying and investigating misuses of our products – especially new types of abuse. This enables our partner teams to develop data-backed product policies and build scaled safety mitigations. Precisely understanding abuse allows us to safely enable users to build useful things with our products. About the Role As a Special Projects Lead within the Intelligence & Investigations team, you will serve as a strategic and operational partner to the Investigation Team’s leadership. This role blends elements of chief of staff, strategic program management, and operational leadership, helping the organization translate strategy into execution. You will lead cross-functional initiatives, oversee complex programs, and build the systems that allow the team to operate effectively as it scales. This includes coordinating strategic planning cycles, tracking key initiatives, developing operational metrics, and ensuring high-priority projects move from concept to execution to completion. You will work closely with investigators, analysts, engineers, and leadership across OpenAI to ensure that safety initiatives are executed efficiently and that critical programs stay on track despite high ambiguity and competing priorities. This role requires someone who thrives in complex environments, can manage multiple high-stakes initiatives simultaneously, and enjoys solving ambiguous operational challenges. This role is remote friendly but will require PST hours. You’re also welcome to work from our San Francisco office, with relocation assistance available.

Requirements

• Have 8+ years of experience in program management, strategic operations, chief of staff roles, consulting, or comparable environments.
• Have experience managing complex cross-functional programs involving technical, operational, and policy stakeholders.
• Thrive in high-ambiguity environments, bringing structure and clarity to evolving priorities and loosely defined problems.
• Are a systems thinker who enjoys building processes, metrics frameworks, dashboards, or OKR tracking systems that improve team effectiveness but in a way that doesn’t feel rigid or overly complex to partners.
• Communicate clearly and concisely with both technical and non-technical audiences and are motivated by OpenAI’s mission to build safe and responsible AI systems.
• Enjoy moving fast in highly ambiguous situations that may never have been considered before at other companies and taking leadership positions to ensure positive and safe outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Partner with team leadership to run periodic planning cycles, translating strategic priorities into clear roadmaps, milestones, and OKRs while tracking progress across complex initiatives.
• Drive and support cross-functional programs involving investigators, subject matter experts, legal stakeholders, and communications and policy partners by maintaining clear timelines, ownership structures, and accountability.
• Identify and resolve operational blockers across teams, ensuring high-priority initiatives move efficiently from planning through execution.
• Identify and support the reporting of metrics and team outcomes to a variety of stakeholders.
• Lead complex and/or ambiguous initiatives that do not yet have a clear owner, driving projects from concept through execution while aligning stakeholders across the organization.
• Produce concise written updates, dashboards, and strategic briefings for leadership while acting as connective tissue with partner teams including Product, Legal, Global Affairs, Safety Systems, and Communications.
• Be someone people enjoy working with and appreciate the opportunity to help others

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed