Technical Program Manager — Foundations Data & Search

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Technical Program Manager for Foundations Data and Operations in San Francisco. You will lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search, partnering with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans and to move complex technical work forward.

This role combines technical depth with product judgment and hands-on execution, spanning retrieval, indexing, and model improvements while collaborating with policy,

Qualifications

• Substantial technical experience delivering complex programs across multiple engineering teams and a large tech stack.
• Experience with search, information retrieval, indexing, or similar complex systems; direct experience with consumer or enterprise search is valuable.
• Able to understand technical architectures, ask useful questions, and communicate with engineers and researchers.
• Balance product judgment with program discipline and maintain momentum.

Responsibilities

• Lead programs across model training, retrieval, large-scale indexing, and search infrastructure.
• Translate evolving goals into prioritized workstreams with clear owners, milestones, dependencies, and resource needs.
• Partner with research, engineering, and product leads to define requirements and make tradeoffs across scope, quality, performance, timelines, and cost.
• Establish program success metrics and use them to guide priorities and track improvements in coverage, answer quality, responsiveness, and trust.
• Identify technical and cross-functional risks early, drive blockers to resolution, and communicate progress and decisions clearly to teams and leadership.
• Coordinate with product, policy, legal, and external partners on data access, use, and presentation, helping teams resolve decisions that span technical and non-technical domains.
• Manage dependencies with data providers and build repeatable processes that help research and engineering teams execute effectively as the search effort grows.

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Technical Program Manager for Foundations Data and Operations in San Francisco. You will lead a broad portfolio of research and engineering programs that power search, partnering with researchers, engineers, and product leaders to turn ambitious goals into clear plans and to move complex technical work forward.

This role combines technical depth with product judgment and hands-on execution, spanning retrieval, indexing, and model improvements while collaborating with policy,