Project Manager, Recruiting Operations

About the Team

At OpenAI, we are dedicated to building safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) to benefit all of humanity. Our mission attracts the world’s top talent in science, engineering, and business to address one of the most ambitious challenges of our time

OpenAI’s Recruiting Operations team ensures our recruiting organization runs smoothly, scales efficiently, and delivers a world-class experience for both candidates and hiring teams. The Systems Lead plays a critical role at the intersection of systems, data integrity, and enablement—making sure our tools and users work in harmony.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Project Manager to drive high-impact programs that improve how we plan, deliver, and scale recruiting.

You will help Recruiting Leads run their business day-to-day while leading the cross-functional work required to execute their most important priorities. You’ll translate strategy into clear plans, surface tradeoffs early, and ensure the right decisions happen at the right time.

In practice, this role is both Chief of Staff-esque and PMO-driven: a trusted thought partner to leaders and an execution owner who brings structure, momentum, and accountability to complex, high-volume work.

You might drive initiatives such as building priority intake and planning mechanisms for Leads, standardizing interview processes across teams, leading enablement rollouts, evaluating and implementing vendors, responding rapidly to hiring spikes, or developing dashboards that track hiring health and recruiter capacity.

In This Role, You Will:

• Own delivery end-to-end: Run intake → planning → execution → launch → retros. Manage scope, risks, dependencies, and timelines across multiple concurrent initiatives.

• Operationalize recruiting strategy: Translate Lead priorities into roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes.

• Run the operating system: Build lightweight cadences and visibility mechanisms (weekly updates, planning cycles, decision logs, RAID tracking) that reduce surprises and keep work moving.

• Lead process and change efforts: Map current workflows, design improved future-state processes, document SOPs, and drive adoption through enablement and communication.

• Deliver tooling and systems improvements: Lead requirements, UAT, rollout, and measurement for recruiting systems and automation projects.

• Use data to guide decisions: Define KPIs and dashboards; use insights to prioritize, measure impact, and continuously improve.

• Align cross-functional partners: Coordinate across Recruiting, RecOps, People Tech/Talent Systems, Finance, and Legal/Procurement to unblock work and drive decisions.

• Act as a strike team resource: Step into high-priority or high-volume initiatives, bring structure quickly, and stabilize execution.

You’ll thrive in this role if you have:

• 5+ years of experience in project/program management, operations, or business operations (People/Talent/HR ops experience strongly preferred).

• Proven success leading complex, cross-functional initiatives with multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.

• Strong ability to turn ambiguity into clear plans, milestones, and decisions.

• Experience building operating rhythms and program infrastructure (workback plans, RAID logs, stakeholder updates, planning cadences).

• Comfort working with data to inform prioritization and measure impact.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; able to influence without authority.

High judgment, ownership mindset, and ability to handle sensitive information with discretion.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push t