Director of Recruiting Operations

About the Team

OpenAI's People team is committed to hiring, engaging, and supporting world-class talent to help safely build and deploy universally beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The Director of Recruiting Operations is responsible for building and running the operating system that makes hiring at OpenAI fast, rigorous, and scalable. This role is responsible for all components that underpin every stage of the recruiting process - ensuring that as OpenAI scales rapidly and globally, our foundations remain accurate, auditable, and candidate-centered.

About the Role:

Recruiting Operations (RecOps) team consists of three pillars: Candidate Experience, Interview Programs and Recruiting Systems, which make up the critical machinery behind hiring. The breadth of work that is entrusted to this team is vast - recruiting coordination at extreme volume, interview operations (governance, interviewer training and load balancing), operational tooling, and managing all the execution rhythms that keep hiring sustainable through volatility and growth. This role is accountable for ensuring recruiting operations scales without heroics, and that our systems are robust and sustainable for the next phase of OpenAI's growth.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We are not considering remote candidates at this time.

In this role, you will:

• Own and continuously improve the recruiting operating system by establishing a scalable RecOps operating model, ensuring focused prioritization, planning, sequencing, execution rhythms, escalation paths, and accountability.

• Build a consistent, highly reliable candidate experience where recruiting coordination runs at high velocity and backlogs or fire drills are rare exceptions.

• Build a world-class interview operations program that is strategic and continuously improving the interviewer experience and capability in response to our growth.

• Lead, develop and grow a high-performing global Recruiting Operations team, setting clear standards, driving accountability, and building strong operational judgment.

• Build an AI-native roadmap for recruiting operations that spans key hiring process touchpoints (scheduling, interviewer operations, approvals, candidate experience, data and quality assurance, and support tooling)

• Raise the bar on automation with a bias toward secure, reliable, governed systems and drive tight integration across recruiting tools and workflows to ensure data accuracy and scalability.

• Evaluate and optimize existing and new recruiting systems and vendors - ensuring they meet the needs of a rapidly growing, global organization.

• Partner with key stakeholders like the People Analytics, Strategic Finance and Recruiting teams to translate headcount forecasts into executable hiring plans that understand resourcing requirements, constraints and system bottlenecks.

• Drive system-of-record hygiene across recruiting tooling in partnership with People systems and operations teams.

• Act as a trusted, systems-oriented leader through periods of expansive growth.

You might thrive in this role if:

• You are someone who takes operational excellence personally and understands that in a company like OpenAI, accuracy, consistency, and compliance are trust functions.

• You are comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment where priorities shift, inputs are imperfect, and the cost of error is high.

• You bring strong judgment and are willing to raise risks, ask hard questions, and push back when something is not ready or defensible.

• You know how to bring structure without slowing the organization down.

• You balance empathy with rigor, and believe that the best candidate experience is built on clear communication, process consistency, and systems that scale.

• You can zoom out to design scalable systems and zoom in to debug complex operational issues when things break.

• You are calm, decisive, and credible with senior leaders, even in moments of pressure or uncertainty.

What We're Looking For:

• 12+ years of progressive experience within talent operations, systems or equivalent operational leadership roles.

• Deep experience designing and building recruiting operations at scale globally

• Strong systems thinking and operational design skills; comfortable driving integrations across ATS, scheduling and workflow tools. Comfort working with Ashby, Workday, Guide, is a plus.

• Strong understanding of global data governance requirements, with demonstrated experience partnering closely with People Compliance and Legal; SOX experience strongly preferred (controls, audit readiness, disciplined reporting).

• Track record delivering AI-enabled or highly automated operations (strategy, build/buy decisions, integration, instrumentation, reliability).

• Proven ability to deliver strong cross-functional leadership with Recruiting, People Ops, People Analytics, Finance, Legal, Real Estate and Workspace, and IT teams.

• Exceptional judgment, attention to detail, communication and prioritization in a fast-moving, high-stakes environment.

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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.

Compensation Range: $265K