Senior Technical Recruiter, Engineering Leadership

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

OpenAI Recruiting Team

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an experienced technical recruiter to lead leadership searches for engineering managers and senior leaders within Applied Foundations in San Francisco. You will own end-to-end recruiting—from role definition and talent mapping to assessment, offers, and close—serving as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders.

You will navigate complex searches, engage accomplished candidates, and partner with compensation to craft winning offers while maintaining a thoughtful candidate

Qualifications

• Experience leading leadership searches for engineering teams
• Executive search or in-house leadership recruiting experience
• Ability to map, define scope, and assess leadership roles and impact

Responsibilities

• Lead full-cycle searches for engineering managers and senior leaders across Applied Foundations.
• Define role scope, leadership expectations, technical requirements, and outcomes of a successful hire.
• Develop talent maps and targeted search strategies using direct sourcing, referrals, and market research.
• Reach out to passive leadership candidates and discuss experience, motivations, and impact at OpenAI.
• Assess leadership capabilities including team building, management development, and organizational direction.
• Advise stakeholders with market intelligence and search evidence; adjust requirements as needed.
• Own complex closing strategies with compensation teams to navigate opportunities and equity considerations.
• Maintain rigorous search cadence, communicate progress, surface risks early, and ensure a strong candidate experience.
• Share insights to improve assessment approaches and help teammates navigate challenging searches.

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's Recruiting team helps bring together the people who advance our mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We partner closely with leaders across the company to identify exceptional talent, build thoughtful hiring processes, and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

This role supports Applied Foundations, partnering with engineering leaders to hire the managers and senior leaders who will help build and scale OpenAI's foundational engineering capabilities.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced technical recruiter with a strong track record of hiring engineering leaders. You'll own leadership searches from initial role definition and talent mapping through assessment, offer negotiation, and close.

You'll serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders, helping clarify what each role requires, understand the talent market, and make thoughtful hiring decisions. You'll bring the judgment to navigate ambiguous searches, the credibility to engage accomplished engineering leaders, and the persistence to build relationships well before someone is ready to make a move.

Experience in executive search or an in-house leadership recruiting function is particularly valuable. You should be equally comfortable shaping a search strategy and personally doing the work to deliver a successful hire.

In this role, you will:

• Lead full-cycle searches for engineering managers and senior engineering leaders across Applied Foundations.

• Partner with hiring leaders to define role scope, leadership expectations, technical requirements, and the outcomes a successful hire will deliver.

• Develop talent maps and targeted search strategies, combining direct sourcing, referrals, market research, and long-term relationship building.

• Engage passive leadership candidates through thoughtful outreach and substantive conversations about their experience, motivations, and potential impact at OpenAI.

• Partner with hiring teams to assess leadership capabilities, including building teams, developing managers, setting technical direction, and leading through change.

• Advise senior stakeholders using market intelligence and search evidence, including when to revisit requirements, broaden a talent pool, or adjust the hiring approach.

• Own complex closing strategies, partnering with hiring leaders and compensation colleagues to navigate competing opportunities, equity considerations, counteroffers, and career decisions.

• Maintain a rigorous operating rhythm across searches, communicating progress, surfacing risks early, and delivering a consistent, thoughtful candidate experience.

• Strengthen leadership recruiting practices by sharing insights, improving assessment approaches, and helping teammates navigate challenging searches.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring substantial technical recruiting experience, with a demonstrated track record of personally owning and closing engineering leadership searches.

• Have experience in executive search, in-house leadership recruiting, or a comparable environment requiring targeted research, senior stakeholder partnership, and discretion.

• Can evaluate leadership scope beyond titles and partner with hiring managers to distinguish technical expertise, people leadership, and organizational impact.

• Build credibility with senior engineering leaders and offer clear recommendations, including constructive pushback when needed.

• Have successfully managed complex offers and understand how compensation, role scope, organizational context, and personal motivations influence a leadership candidate's decision.

• Combine strategic judgment with strong sourcing and execution skills, taking ownership from search kickoff through close.

• Learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and adapt effectively as priorities or role requirements evolve.

• Communicate clearly, handle sensitive information thoughtfully, and approach feedback with humility and a willingness to update your perspective.

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.

OpenAI's Affi­cative 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 require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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