Program Officer, AI Resources

OpenAI Foundation•San Francisco, CA

19h

About The Position

OpenAI Foundation is hiring at least two founding Program Officers for its AI Resources team, part of AI Resilience. The team develops the Foundation’s ability to secure, allocate, and effectively deploy AI resources—the work AI systems can perform—for the Foundation’s mission, through grantees and, where useful, within the Foundation itself. It builds a reliable portfolio of access arrangements across changing demand, capability, and market scenarios, and learns where AI resources can do the most good. Program Officers will be generalists with technical judgment and will support the team lead across operations, grantmaking, research, strategy, and partnerships. This is an early, founding-team role that will help develop a new program and determine how AI resources can strengthen AI resilience, including biosecurity, model safety, and cybersecurity. The work includes researching portfolio strategy and market scenarios, assessing how organizations can effectively use AI resources, supporting grantmaking from sourcing through delivery, and working with the wider AI Resilience team. One specialization focuses on partnerships: managing the relationship with OpenAI PBC, securing tokens and model access, exploring compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals, and engaging counterparties across the market. This specialization also includes evaluating acquisition trade-offs, maintaining the acquisition portfolio, and designing financing arrangements with Foundation finance, legal, and tax teams. The role reports to Lennart Heim, Director of AI Resources. The annual base salary range is $220,000 to $300,000 USD. Actual salary depends on job-related factors, including experience, skills, expertise, role scope, and work location. The stated range excludes benefits and other compensation for which the role may be eligible.

Requirements

Generalist execution ability, comfort with ambiguity and context-switching, and ability to work across operations, grantmaking, research, and strategy while maintaining quality.
Follow frontier AI capabilities and risks closely enough to exercise independent judgment and translate it for grantees, providers, and internal stakeholders.
Take the AGI trajectory seriously, including short timelines and the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and have considered views on AI capability development, the future role of AI systems, and how compute enables them.
Understand the team's hypothesis that increasingly capable AI can be directed at the challenges it creates.
Technical fluency in data centers, compute, AI models, and infrastructure, with enough compute literacy to assess a cluster or token request.
Deep familiarity with the AI resilience, safety, and security ecosystem; an existing network is desirable but not stated as required.
Use AI tools by default and look for ways to automate and compress routine work.
Strong alignment with the mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity.

Nice To Haves

Grantmaking, philanthropy, or research-funding experience.
Industry experience negotiating compute capacity, token, or related deals, such as renting or managing GPU clusters.
An existing network across compute providers, financiers, and AI companies.
A technical background with deeper expertise somewhere along the AI stack, from semiconductors and compute infrastructure through AI development, deployment, and surrounding tooling.
Exposure to model alignment, safety, or evaluations.

Responsibilities

Research what the AI resources portfolio should look like and recommend actions, taking into account potential compute shortages, counterparty risks, and market scenarios.
Help shape the AI Resources team's strategy and scale resources to grantees and within the Foundation.
Research where returns on AI resources are highest, where diminishing returns begin, what grantees demand, what organizations need to absorb additional resources, and whether direct provision of AI resources creates more value than cash.
Support grantmaking end to end, including sourcing, diligence, grant investigations, and getting resources into grantees’ hands.
Identify projects and organizations that should exist in the field and support finding or developing people to build them.
Work with the broader AI Resilience team across biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and related issues to identify where AI Resources can help.
For the partnerships specialization, explore and execute compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals across the portfolio, weighing cost, security, delivery time, scale, and counterparty risk, and maintain the acquisition portfolio.
For the partnerships specialization, design and execute financing arrangements with Foundation finance, legal, and tax teams.
For the partnerships specialization, build and manage the relationship with OpenAI PBC concerning model access, tokens, and compute arrangements, and engage market counterparties.
Represent the Foundation credibly to senior executives at providers, AI companies, and financial institutions.