Technical Program Manager, Applied Research

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

4h

About The Position

This TPM role sits within the OAI for Science org, specifically on the Applied Research team. The broader org focuses on harnessing frontier AI models to transform scientific, strategic, economically important domains. They build partnerships with established industry leaders to solve distribution challenges and help bring AI innovation to these spaces. The team operates like a startup within OpenAI, with unmatched research depth, compute, and real-world impact.
About the Role
Technical Program Managers at OpenAI place heavy emphasis on “technical” ability, not just program leadership. You will be expected to own end-to-end program leadership for complex, highly technical research initiatives that turn ambiguous research goals into measurable technical outcomes. You will drive execution across Research, Infrastructure, Data/Compliance, Forward Deployed Engineering, Customer Success, and external partners, ensuring milestones, governance, and delivery discipline without compromising integrity, security, or safety.

Responsibilities

• Create and own the technical roadmap with the tech lead.
• Convert ambiguity into executable specs: task definitions, grading/eval methodology, baselines, acceptance thresholds, and go/no-go gates.
• Own the cross-stack critical path: data readiness, infra readiness, training loop readiness, and eval readiness.
• Align partners technically: shared roadmaps, shared milestones/definitions of success, and escalation paths when constraints block progress.
• Partner with research and engineering leads to define technical requirements, integration plans, and evaluation strategy.
• Operationalize training runs: runbooks, dashboards, triage paths, postmortems, and recurring-failure elimination via automation.
• Align partner incentives with OpenAI priorities.
• Maintain executive-level clarity on partnership health, risks, and opportunities.
• Drive decision-making without formal authority through structured narratives, options framing, and tradeoff clarity.
• Produce high-quality artifacts: program docs, executive memos, runbooks, dashboards, and partner-facing updates.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees