Program Officer, AI Resources

OpenAI Foundation • San Francisco, CA

48d • $220,000 - $300,000

About The Position

The OpenAI Foundation is dedicated to harnessing the power of AI to solve humanity's most pressing challenges while proactively addressing the new risks that advanced AI presents. The AI Resilience team, specifically the AI Resources team, focuses on building the Foundation's capacity to secure, allocate, and deploy AI resources for its mission. This involves developing reliable access arrangements for AI resources, understanding where these resources can be most impactful, and ensuring the Foundation and its grantees can leverage advanced AI capabilities at scale. This founding Program Officer role is crucial for rethinking AI resilience, exploring how AI can uplift various fields like biosecurity, model safety, and cybersecurity, and developing new programs to support this mission. The role requires a generalist with technical judgment, capable of contributing to operations, grantmaking, research, strategy, and partnerships. A specialization in partnerships is also sought, focusing on managing relationships with OpenAI PBC, securing AI resources, exploring compute acquisitions, and engaging with market counterparties.

Requirements

• High execution, comfortable with ambiguity and context-switching, and able to move between operations, grantmaking, research, and strategy without dropping quality.
• Follow frontier AI capabilities and risks closely enough to have independent judgment about them and can translate that judgment for grantees, providers, and internal stakeholders.
• Take the AGI trajectory seriously, including short timelines and the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and have a view on where AI is going: your own takes on how capabilities will develop, a model of the role AI systems will play in future worlds and how compute will power them, and a grasp of the team's core hypothesis: that increasingly capable AI can be directed at the challenges it creates.
• Fluent in the technical layers (data centers, compute, AI models, and infrastructure in general) with enough compute literacy to sanity-check a cluster or token request.
• Deep familiarity with the AI resilience, safety, and security ecosystem, ideally with an existing network.
• AI-native: you use AI tools by default and look for ways to automate and compress routine work.
• Deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

Nice To Haves

• Grantmaking, philanthropy, or research-funding experience.
• Industry experience striking deals on compute capacity, tokens, and more (you may have rented GPU clusters or even managed them), ideally with 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 to AI development, deployment, and the surrounding tooling) ideally with exposure to model alignment, safety, or evaluations.

Responsibilities

• Do research on what the AI resources portfolio should look like and which actions to take now (thinking through potential compute crunches, counterparty risks, and market scenarios) and help shape the team's strategy.
• Help figure out how to scale AI resources to grantees, within the Foundation itself, and for what this means for the future of philanthropy: how every part of AI resilience (biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, and more) can benefit from and be uplifted by AI.
• Conduct research that informs program strategy: where returns to AI resources are highest, where diminishing returns set in, what grantees actually demand, what it takes for organizations to absorb more AI resources, and whether providing AI resources directly creates more value than cash.
• Support grantmaking end to end (sourcing, diligence, and getting resources into grantees' hands) including grant investigations.
• Help identify the projects and organizations that should exist in this space, and support finding or developing the people to build them.
• Work closely with the broader AI Resilience team on the wider set of issues across biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and more, and find where AI Resources can support.
• Explore and execute potential compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals across the portfolio, weighing trade-offs across cost, security, time-to-delivery, scale, and counterparty risk, and maintaining the acquisition portfolio.
• Design and execute the financing side with Foundation finance, legal, and tax: how arrangements get paid for and which structures fit which needs.
• Build and manage the partnership with OpenAI PBC (model access, tokens, and compute arrangements) and engage counterparties across the market, representing the Foundation credibly to senior executives at providers, AI companies, and financial institutions.

Benefits

• Annual base salary range for this role is $220,000 to $300,000 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.

What This Job Offers

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