Head of Talent

OpenAI Foundation • San Francisco, CA

3d • $258,000 - $355,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We are looking for our founding Head of Talent: a proven talent leader who will own hiring for the Foundation from the ground up. You will be part of the founding team in the organization, and you will build and lead the hiring function that lets us grow fast without lowering the bar. This is a player-coach role. The right person has led recruiting inside a frontier AI lab or a comparable high-bar organization as it scaled and is still excellent at the hands-on work. You will personally run our most important searches end to end — scoping, sourcing, closing — across technical, research, program, and operating positions in every Foundation program, while laying the foundations of the team you will grow. You will partner directly with our most senior leaders and report to our Director of Operations. Please note that this role is in-office in San Francisco, CA. Remote candidates will not be considered.

Requirements

• Have 10+ years in talent, including leading recruiting — as a head of recruiting, director, or founding recruiter — at a frontier AI lab, research organization, or another environment with a famously high bar.
• Have taken an organization through rapid early scaling: joined when the team was small, built the recruiting function and processes from scratch, and grew the people around you — and are energized rather than unsettled by doing it again.
• Have personally hired senior researchers, engineers, and operators, closing against offers from the best companies in the world.
• Can hold your own in a substantive conversation about AI and the mission, enough to earn the trust of researchers, engineers, and senior operators.
• Are a genuinely persuasive closer who wins on substance and relationship, not pressure.
• Operate with discipline and care without needing a large team around you.
• Are deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

Nice To Haves

• Experience that spans recruiting and people operations — leveling, compensation design, onboarding — so the hiring system and the employee experience grow together.
• Time in mission-driven organizations — nonprofits, philanthropies, climate or safety-focused funds — and a track record of hiring for first-of-their-kind roles.
• Experience advising founders or senior leaders on talent strategy, org design, and compensation.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the Foundation, from role scoping and intake through sourcing, candidate experience, offer design, and close.
• Partner with founding leaders across all four programs to turn ambiguous mandates into crisp role definitions, calibrated bars, and structured interview loops.
• Build top-of-funnel from scratch: sourcing strategies, talent maps, and warm pipelines for technical, research, grantmaking, policy, and operating talent.
• Design and run the interview process itself — scorecards, debriefs, calibration — and raise the quality bar as the team grows.
• Close exceptional, mission-aligned people who have other excellent options, by being genuinely fluent in the work and honest about the trade-offs.
• Stand up the recruiting infrastructure a new org needs: ATS and tooling, pipeline reporting, employer brand, and a candidate experience that reflects the seriousness of the mission.
• Hire and lead recruiters if and when the Foundation grows, and own the people foundations that come with the function: leveling, offer frameworks, and a consistent hiring bar across programs.
• Act as a trusted advisor on org design, leveling, and compensation strategy as we scale.

Benefits

• The annual base salary range for this role is $258,000 to $355,000 USD.
• This range reflects our good-faith estimate of the base salary we reasonably expect to pay for this position upon hire.
• Actual base salary will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, skills, expertise, the scope of the role, and work location, as applicable.
• This salary range does not include benefits or any other compensation for which the role may be eligible.
• We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.
• Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

What This Job Offers

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