Program Officer, AI Resources

OpenAI Foundation; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI Foundation is hiring at least two founding Program Officers for AI Resources in San Francisco. You will lead operations, grantmaking, research, strategy, and partnerships under the Director of AI Resources, Lennart Heim.

This early role focuses on rethinking AI resilience and scaling resources to grantees. Qualifications emphasize generalist execution, independent judgment on AI capabilities and risks, and a deep familiarity with AI infrastructure.

Qualifications

• You are a doer with generalist range: high execution, comfortable with ambiguity and context-switching, and able to move between operations, grantmaking, research, and strategy without dropping quality.
• Follow frontier AI capabilities and risks closely enough to have independent judgment about them and translate that judgment for grantees, providers, and internal stakeholders.
• Take the AGI trajectory seriously, including short timelines and the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and have a view on where AI is going: your own takes on how capabilities will develop, a model of the role AI systems will play in future worlds and how compute will power them, and a grasp of the team's core hypothesis: that increasingly capable AI can be directed at the challenges it creates.
• Are fluent in the technical layers (data centers, compute, AI models, and infrastructure in general) with enough compute literacy to sanity-check a cluster or token request.
• Have deep familiarity with the AI resilience, safety, and security ecosystem, ideally with an existing network.
• Are AI-native: you use AI tools by default and look for ways to automate and compress routine work.
• Are deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

Responsibilities

• Do research on what the AI resources portfolio should look like and which actions to take now and help shape the team's strategy.
• Help figure out how to scale AI resources to grantees, within the Foundation itself, and for what this means for the future of philanthropy.
• Conduct research that informs program strategy: where returns to AI resources are highest, where diminishing returns set in, what grantees actually demand, how it takes for organizations to absorb more AI resources, and whether providing AI resources directly creates more value than cash.
• Support grantmaking end to end (sourcing, diligence, and getting resources into grantees' hands) including grant investigations.
• Help identify the projects and organizations that should exist in this space, and support finding or developing the people to build them.
• Work closely with the broader AI Resilience team on the wider set of issues across biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and more, and find where AI Resources can support.
• Additionally, we're hiring for a person specialized on partnerships who will focus on:
• Explore and execute potential compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals across the portfolio, weighing trade-offs across cost, security, time-to-delivery, scale, and counterparty risk, and maintaining the acquisition portfolio.
• Design and execute the financing side with Foundation finance, legal, and tax: how arrangements get paid for and which structures fit which needs.
• Build and manage the partnership with OpenAI PBC (model access, tokens, and compute arrangements) and engage counterparties across the market, representing the Foundation credibly to senior executives at providers, AI companies, and financial institutions.

Job description

AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more.

But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.

These are the two dimensions of what we’re building the Foundation to do. We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances.

This work is just beginning. Over the next year, as we quickly ramp up, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs. This includes early investments toward our previously announced $25 billion commitment to curing diseases and AI resilience.

About the team

AI Resilience helps society absorb, adapt to, and benefit from increasingly capable AI systems, with work across biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, children and youth, and the future of the economy. The team is small and fast-moving with many workstreams, candidates, advisors, grantees, board touchpoints, and special projects in flight.

Within AI Resilience, the AI Resources team builds the Foundation's ability to secure, allocate, and effectively deploy AI resources — the work AI systems can perform — for the mission, through grantees and, where useful, within the Foundation itself. We do this by developing a portfolio of access arrangements that stays reliable across different demand, capability, and market scenarios, and by learning where AI resources does the most good. As AI capabilities advance, so does the work they can do for the mission. AI Resources makes sure the Foundation and its grantees can put those capabilities to work at scale.

About the role

We are hiring at least two founding Program Officers for AI Resources: generalists with technical judgment who will be the team lead's right hands across everything the team does: operations, grantmaking, research, strategy, and partnerships. You will report to Lennart Heim, Director of AI Resources.

This is a role about rethinking AI resilience itself. Every part of the field — biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, and beyond — can be uplifted by AI, and we want to figure out how: which challenges AI can help with first, what it takes for the organizations working on them to use it well, and how the whole ecosystem can move at the pace AI itself moves.

This is an early, founding-team role: we are still figuring out how AI resources works best, we want to become the best in the world at it, and you will help develop a new program that we think could be one of the most important levers for AI resilience.

As one specialization, we're looking for a person focused on partnerships: managing the relationship with OpenAI PBC, securing tokens and model access, exploring potential compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals, and engaging counterparties across the market.

In this role, you will

• Do research on what the AI resources portfolio should look like and which actions to take now (thinking through potential compute crunches, counterparty risks, and market scenarios) and help shape the team's strategy.
• Help figure out how to scale AI resources to grantees, within the Foundation itself, and for what this means for the future of philanthropy: how every part of AI resilience (biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, and more) can benefit from and be uplifted by AI.
• Conduct research that informs program strategy: where returns to AI resources are highest, where diminishing returns set in, what grantees actually demand, how it takes for organizations to absorb more AI resources, and whether providing AI resources directly creates more value than cash.
• Support grantmaking end to end (sourcing, diligence, and getting resources into grantees' hands) including grant investigations.
• Help identify the projects and organizations that should exist in this space, and support finding or developing the people to build them.
• Work closely with the broader AI Resilience team on the wider set of issues across biosecurity, cybersecurity, model safety, and more, and find where AI Resources can support.

Additionally, we're hiring for a person specialized on partnerships who will focus on:

• Explore and execute potential compute acquisitions, deals, and rentals across the portfolio, weighing trade-offs across cost, security, time-to-delivery, scale, and counterparty risk, and maintaining the acquisition portfolio.
• Design and execute the financing side with Foundation finance, legal, and tax: how arrangements get paid for and which structures fit which needs.
• Build and manage the partnership with OpenAI PBC (model access, tokens, and compute arrangements) and engage counterparties across the market, representing the Foundation credibly to senior executives at providers, AI companies, and financial institutions.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Are a doer with generalist range: high execution, comfortable with ambiguity and context-switching, and able to move between operations, grantmaking, research, and strategy without dropping quality.
• Follow frontier AI capabilities and risks closely enough to have independent judgment about them and can translate that judgment for grantees, providers, and internal stakeholders.
• Take the AGI trajectory seriously, including short timelines and the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and have a view on where AI is going: your own takes on how capabilities will develop, a model of the role AI systems will play in future worlds and how compute will power them, and a grasp of the team's core hypothesis: that increasingly capable AI can be directed at the challenges it creates.
• Are fluent in the technical layers (data centers, compute, AI models, and infrastructure in general) with enough compute literacy to sanity-check a cluster or token request.
• Have deep familiarity with the AI resilience, safety, and security ecosystem, ideally with an existing network.
• Are AI-native: you use AI tools by default and look for ways to automate and compress routine work.
• Are deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.

It would be great if you also have

• Grantmaking, philanthropy, or research-funding experience.
• Industry experience striking deals on compute capacity, tokens, and more (you may have rented GPU clusters or even managed them), ideally with an existing network across compute providers, financiers, and AI companies.
• A technical background with deeper expertise somewhere along the AI stack (from semiconductors and compute infrastructure to AI development, deployment, and the surrounding tooling) ideally with exposure to model alignment, safety, or evaluations.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this role is $220,000 to $300,000 USD.

This range reflects our good-faith estimate of the base salary we reasonably expect to pay for this position upon hire. Actual base salary will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, skills, expertise, the scope of the role, and work location, as applicable.

This salary range does not include benefits or any other compensation for which the role may be eligible.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.