Senior Counsel, Employment (Global)

About the Team

OpenAI’s Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering our mission by tackling innovative and fundamental legal issues in AI. The team includes professionals with expertise spanning technology, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax law, regulatory, and litigation. If you’re passionate about meaningful and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you.

About the Role

We’re looking for an experienced employment lawyer to support a growing volume of complex employment matters as OpenAI scales globally. This role will focus on advising on employment law issues across jurisdictions, supporting the People team, and building scalable processes for legal support as we expand.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Advise on a broad range of employment legal matters, including international employment law.

• Partner closely with the People team to support business and employee needs.

• Support strategic initiatives such as legal training, and manage outside counsel on employment litigation and administrative charges.

• Lead in developing processes that scale legal support for employment issues across OpenAI.
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of combined legal experience at fast-paced technology companies and/or law firms, with experience in international employment law and M&A.

• Strong expertise on employment law aspects of global growth, and ensuring compliant market entry and workforce integration across jurisdictions.

• Deep experience advising multinational companies on complex cross-border employment issues.

• Proficiency advising on US federal and state labor and employment laws and regulations.

• Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.

• Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA.

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 applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties req