Director of Project Management

Director of Project Management — OpenAI
Proposed candidate sourcing profile | September 28, 2026
Status: Research-based draft, not an OpenAI-authored vacancy or confirmation that this title is open.
Function assumed: Product and platform technical program management, spanning ChatGPT, API, and enterprise capabilities.
Location, reporting line, compensation, and work arrangement: To be confirmed with the hiring team. OpenAI's related current TPM roles are generally listed in San Francisco, often with a hybrid schedule; that does not establish terms for this proposed director role.
About the opportunity
OpenAI researches and deploys advanced AI systems with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Its product and platform teams bring models into products used by consumers, developers, and organizations. This proposed director role would lead the discipline that turns ambitious, evolving product and technical priorities into coordinated delivery across teams.
The Director of Project Management would own a portfolio of complex, high-impact programs across ChatGPT, the API platform, and enterprise offerings. The person would partner with product, engineering, design, research, infrastructure, safety, security, legal, policy, and go-to-market leaders to set priorities, resolve tradeoffs, manage dependencies, and bring launches into reliable operation. The role combines direct ownership of the hardest initiatives with leadership of a small, high-caliber team of technical program or project managers, if the organization confirms people management scope.
The successful candidate brings enough technical depth to challenge assumptions and understand architecture, model deployment, APIs, reliability, and enterprise requirements. They create useful structure under uncertainty without slowing research or engineering teams with excessive process. Their measure of success is better decisions and outcomes, rather than more status reporting.
Responsibilities

• Set the operating approach for a portfolio of product and platform programs: clarify outcomes, owners, decision rights, priorities, milestones, dependencies, and measures of success.
• Lead major cross-functional initiatives from definition through development, evaluation, launch readiness, rollout, and post-launch learning. Step into the most ambiguous or high-stakes work personally.
• Partner with product and engineering leaders on sequencing and tradeoffs among user value, technical feasibility, capacity, reliability, security, safety, and delivery speed.
• Coordinate work across model/research, application, API, infrastructure, enterprise, and go-to-market teams where a launch or customer commitment depends on several organizations.
• Build clear mechanisms for intake, prioritization, program reviews, risk escalation, decision records, and executive communication. Maintain visibility into the critical path without creating an unnecessary PMO bureaucracy.
• Define appropriate launch criteria and operational handoffs, including evaluations, quality signals, security and safety reviews, support readiness, monitoring, rollback plans, and ownership after release.
• Surface blockers early, frame options and consequences, secure decisions from the right leaders, and follow through until issues are resolved.
• Establish outcome measures for delivery health, launch quality, adoption, reliability, and recurring process bottlenecks; use evidence to improve how teams work.
• Recruit, coach, and develop project/program management talent if this is a people-leadership role. Set a high bar for technical fluency, judgment, written communication, and independent ownership.
• Represent program health candidly to senior leadership, including what is uncertain, which commitments are at risk, and what decision or resource change is needed.
  Required experience and capabilities
• Significant experience leading complex technical programs in a fast-moving software, AI, cloud, infrastructure, or developer-platform environment. For sourcing, target roughly 12+ years of relevant experience, including several years leading portfolios or senior program managers; treat this as a search heuristic, not a verified OpenAI requirement.
• Track record of delivering products or platforms with multiple dependent teams, uncertain requirements, and consequential launch or operational risks.
• Strong technical fluency across modern software systems, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and product development. Able to hold substantive discussions with engineers and researchers without needing to be the principal architect.
• Excellent judgment about prioritization, scope, sequencing, risk, and when to escalate. Can distinguish genuine blockers from routine uncertainty.
• Ability to influence senior technical and business leaders without relying on formal authority; crisp written and verbal communication that turns complexity into actionable decisions.
• Experience building lightweight operating mechanisms that improve execution at scale and can show measurable results.
• For a people-manager version of the role: demonstrated hiring, coaching, performance management, and development of senior technical program managers.
  Particularly relevant background
• AI/ML products, model launches and evaluations, trust and safety, or responsible deployment.
• Consumer products with large-scale usage, developer platforms and APIs, or enterprise software with identity, administration, security, and governance requirements.
• Portfolio leadership across product, engineering, research, infrastructure, and commercial teams.
• Scaling a technical program management function in a rapidly changing organization.
  These are signals to explore, not rigid filters. A candidate with exceptional technical program leadership from another domain may be stronger than someone whose résumé merely includes AI terminology.
  What success could look like in the first year
• Leaders have a shared, credible view of the highest-priority initiatives, owners, dependencies, and decisions needed.
• Critical launches have explicit readiness criteria, surfaced risks, clear handoffs, and measurable post-launch outcomes.
• Cross-team bottlenecks are resolved faster, with fewer avoidable surprises and less duplicate coordination.
• Program managers are trusted by technical teams as partners who improve execution and judgment.
• The delivery system remains adaptable as model capabilities, product priorities, and safety requirements change.
  Candidate search brief
  Likely titles: Director or Head of Technical Program Management; Director of Product/Engineering Program Management; Senior Director of Program Management; Head of Product Operations with deep technical delivery ownership; senior principal TPM with proven team-building potential.
  Screen for evidence: Ask for one launch spanning research or ML, engineering, product, and operational stakeholders. Have the candidate explain the actual decisions they drove, technical tradeoffs they understood, risk they escalated, launch criteria they established, how they measured results, and how their team grew. Distinguish direct ownership from meeting facilitation.
  Resolve with hiring manager before external outreach: Which portfolio this director owns; whether it is research, product/platform, enterprise deployment, or company operations; people-management scope; reporting line; location/work arrangement; compensation; and whether OpenAI has authorized this vacancy and title.