Real Estate and Workplace, Strategy and Operations Manager

About the Team

The Real Estate & Workplace (REW) team is responsible for shaping how OpenAI’s physical environments enable innovation, collaboration, and growth. We oversee global real estate strategy, workplace operations, design & construction, and employee experience across a rapidly expanding footprint.

As OpenAI scales globally, REW plays a critical role in creating spaces that enable our team members to do the best work of their lives.

About the Role

The Strategy & Operations Manager is responsible for ensuring the REW organization operates cohesively as we scale. This role translates strategy into sequencing, governance, alignment, and change management across multiple functions including People, Finance, IT, Security, and Legal.

This is not a traditional project management role. It is a system-level integrator role that shapes how the organization moves.

This is an in office role (5 days a week) based in San Francisco, CA. Relocation is available.

In this role you will:

• Translate REW strategy into clear priorities, sequencing, and execution plans across a fast-scaling org.

• Design and run operating cadences and governance forums that drive clarity, speed, and accountability (without adding bureaucracy).

• Lead cross-functional alignment across REW and key partners (People, Finance, IT, Security, Legal), surfacing tradeoffs and driving timely decisions.

• Drive change management for major workplace and real estate initiatives, including comms, rollout planning, and adoption follow-through.

• Identify recurring friction points (process, ownership, dependencies) and implement lightweight systems to remove blockers and improve coordination.

• Support enterprise-scale initiatives, including new business needs and M&A integration, ensuring REW operating rhythms scale with growth.

• Build simple, repeatable frameworks (planning, decision-making, operating metrics) that help the organization move predictably at speed.

You’ll thrive in this role if you have:

• 8+ years of experience in strategy, operations, program leadership, or business operations

• Experience designing operating models, governance forums, or cross-functional coordination systems
  Demonstrated success scaling complex organizations in high-growth or high-ambiguity environments

• Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and align competing priorities

• Strong executive communication skills, including structured memo writing and decision frameworks

• High judgment with the ability to balance speed, risk, and organizational health

• Low ego, high ownership, and a systems-oriented mindset

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applica