Founding Head of Talent - Scale World-Class Hiring

OpenAI Foundation; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 258,000 - 355,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI Foundation in San Francisco, CA seeks its founding Head of Talent to own hiring from the ground up. You will lead the recruiting function end to end across technical, research, program, and operating roles, while building the team you will grow and partnering with our senior leaders.

This in-office role requires a proven track record of scaling recruiting in frontier AI or similarly high-bar environments, with strong executive-level closing skills and a mission-aligned mindset.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in talent, including leading recruiting - as a head of recruiting, director, or founding recruiter - at a frontier AI lab, research organization, or another environment with a famously high bar.
• Have taken an organization through rapid early scaling: joined when the team was small, built the recruiting function and processes from scratch, and grew the people around you.
• Have personally hired senior researchers, engineers, and operators, closing against offers from the best companies in the world.

Responsibilities

• Own full-cycle recruiting across the Foundation, from role scoping and intake through sourcing, candidate experience, offer design, and close.
• Partner with founding leaders across all four programs to turn ambiguous mandates into crisp role definitions, calibrated bars, and structured interview loops.
• Build top-of-funnel from scratch: sourcing strategies, talent maps, and warm pipelines for technical, research, grantmaking, policy, and operating talent.
• Design and run the interview process itself - scorecards, debriefs, calibration - and raise the quality bar as the team grows.
• Close exceptional, mission-aligned people who have other excellent options, by being genuinely fluent in the work and honest about the trade-offs.
• Stand up the recruiting infrastructure a new org needs: ATS and tooling, pipeline reporting, employer brand, and a candidate experience that reflects the seriousness of the mission.
• Hire and lead recruiters if and when the Foundation grows, and own the people foundations that come with the function: leveling, offer frameworks, and a consistent hiring bar across programs.
• Act as a trusted advisor on org design, leveling, and compensation strategy as we scale.

Skills

Talent leadership

Recruiting strategy

Executive recruiting

Stakeholder management

People operations

Tools

ATS

Sourcing tools

CRM

Job description

OpenAI Foundation in San Francisco, CA seeks its founding Head of Talent to own hiring from the ground up. You will lead the recruiting function end to end across technical, research, program, and operating roles, while building the team you will grow and partnering with our senior leaders.

This in-office role requires a proven track record of scaling recruiting in frontier AI or similarly high-bar environments, with strong executive-level closing skills and a mission-aligned mindset.