Executive Compensation Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s Equity Programs team designs and governs equity frameworks that align our people with the long-term success of safely building and deploying universally beneficial artificial general intelligence. The team ensures equity programs are well-structured, scalable, and grounded in strong governance as OpenAI grows.

By partnering closely with Finance, Legal, and People leaders, the Equity Programs team designs competitive equity offerings while maintaining disciplined stewardship of the equity pool, enabling OpenAI to attract, retain, and motivate exceptional talent in support of our mission.

About the Role

We’re hiring an Executive Compensation Lead to help shape how OpenAI compensates its most senior leaders. This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on executive pay strategy, equity design, and governance in a fast-growing, high-visibility environment.

In this role, you will partner closely with senior leadership, Finance, Legal, and the Compensation Committee to design and evaluate executive compensation frameworks, assess equity usage and dilution, and support critical compensation decisions. You will own executive compensation analysis end to end, including benchmarking, modeling, and preparing clear, board-ready materials that inform leadership and committee decisions.

This role is ideal for someone with strong executive compensation expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to translate complex pay and governance considerations into practical, decision-ready recommendations. This role reports to our Head of Equity Programs

Your Responsibilities:

• Design, evolve, and govern executive compensation and equity programs, including base salary, annual incentives, and long-term equity, aligned to business strategy, market benchmarks, and long-term value creation.

• Lead executive compensation benchmarking and market analysis, including peer group construction, pay positioning, and evaluation of emerging practices across late-stage private and public technology companies.

• Develop and maintain sophisticated models to assess executive pay outcomes, equity grant sizing, dilution, burn rate, and stock-based compensation expense under multiple scenarios.

• Partner closely with Legal and Finance to ensure executive compensation programs align with disclosure, governance, and compliance requirements.

• Prepare clear, decision-ready materials for senior leadership and the Compensation Committee, including executive pay proposals, equity usage analyses, and compensation review recommendations.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders by translating complex compensation, equity, and governance tradeoffs into concise, actionable insights.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with Total Rewards, HRBPs, Recruiting, and Equity Administration to ensure accurate execution, implementation, and ongoing oversight of executive compensation programs.

We’re Seeking

• 8+ years of experience in executive and equity compensation, ideally within high-growth or late-stage technology companies.

• Direct experience supporting executive compensation decisions and/or Compensation Committee processes.

• Strong financial modeling and analytical skills, with the ability to assess tradeoffs across pay, dilution, governance, and retention.

• Familiarity with executive compensation practices, including benchmarking, disclosure considerations, and governance standards.

• Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills; experience with compensation survey tools and analytics platforms is a plus.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with comfort producing board-level and executive-ready materials.

• High integrity, sound judgment, and discretion when handling sensitive executive information.

Workplace & Location

This role is based in our San Francisco office and we aren’t considering remote applications at this time. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office with optional work from