Technical Program Manager, Foundations Data and Operations

About the Team

The Search research team focuses on building the systems that help AI systems find, retrieve, and use information from the world. We aim to make answers more useful and grounded for more than a billion ChatGPT users.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Technical Program Manager to lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search. You’ll partner closely with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans, resolve dependencies, and move complex technical work forward.

This role combines technical depth, product judgment, and hands-on execution. You’ll work across retrieval, indexing, and model improvements, while collaborating with policy, legal, and external data partners. You’ll help teams make informed tradeoffs and build practical ways of working that support a fast-moving research environment.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

In this role, you will

• Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure.

• Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs.

• Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost.

• Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust.

• Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.

• Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.

• Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have substantial technical experience and a record of delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large technical stack.

• Have worked on search, information retrieval, indexing, or similarly complex systems. Direct experience with consumer or enterprise search products is especially valuable.

• Can understand technical architectures and tradeoffs, ask useful questions, and communicate effectively with both engineers and researchers.

• Bring clarity to ambiguous research problems and adapt plans as teams learn, while maintaining ownership and momentum.

• Combine product judgment with program discipline, connecting technical decisions to the quality of the user experience.

• Are resourceful and hands-on, comfortable moving between program strategy and the details needed to unblock execution.

• Build trust across functions, communicate clearly, and influence decisions across teams with different priorities.

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 a

Responsibilities

• Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure.
• Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs.
• Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost.
• Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust.
• Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.
• Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.
• Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.

Requirements

• Substantial technical experience and a record of delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large technical stack.
• Experience working on search, information retrieval, indexing, or similarly complex systems.
• Ability to understand technical architectures and tradeoffs, ask useful questions, and communicate effectively with both engineers and researchers.
• Bring clarity to ambiguous research problems and adapt plans as teams learn, while maintaining ownership and momentum.
• Combine product judgment with program discipline, connecting technical decisions to the quality of the user experience.
• Resourceful and hands-on, comfortable moving between program strategy and the details needed to unblock execution.
• Build trust across functions, communicate clearly, and influence decisions across teams with different priorities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct experience with consumer or enterprise search products is especially valuable.