Technical Program Manager, Model Deployment & Capacity

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead the operating system for Chat capacity and model deployment. You will connect demand forecasting with capacity planning, and own mainline model deployment across research, inference, and product teams.

The role emphasizes structured decision making, scalable tooling, and clear readiness gates. You will drive launch coordination, define metrics for capacity and deployment velocity, and communicate risks to technical and

Qualifications

• Experience leading technical programs in infrastructure, distributed systems, or large-scale deployment.
• Ability to reason about demand, supply, latency, reliability, and quality tradeoffs.
• Built operating mechanisms that replaced fragmented workflows with scalable systems.

Responsibilities

• Own cross-functional programs for Chat capacity forecasting, allocation, headroom planning, and constrained-capacity operations.
• Build durable intake, prioritization, and decision mechanisms linking product demand to capacity.
• Partner with product, research, inference, fleet, and capacity teams to surface tradeoffs and drive decisions.
• Lead model deployment readiness and rollout planning, including serving-capacity allocation and sequencing.
• Establish readiness gates, risk reviews, rollback criteria, and escalation paths for deployments.
• Drive launch coordination through deployment and post-launch learning, improving tooling and processes.
• Define metrics for forecast accuracy, capacity utilization, deployment velocity, and reliability.
• Communicate dependencies and risks clearly to technical and product leaders.

Skills

Program management

Infrastructure

Model deployment

Forecasting

Stakeholder alignment

Job description

About the Team

The Product & Platform teams at OpenAI are responsible for delivering the company’s most impactful offerings—such as ChatGPT, our API platform, and new enterprise capabilities—to a global and diverse customer base. These systems must perform at scale and deliver exceptional experiences to developers, consumers, and businesses alike.

The ChatGPT infrastructure team is responsible for ensuring that our products can serve rapidly growing demand with the performance, reliability, and quality our users expect.

This work sits at the intersection of product demand, model deployment, inference, research, fleet, and capacity. The team translates changing product and model needs into clear capacity decisions and safe, scalable launches.

About the Role

We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead the operating system for Chat capacity and model deployment. You will connect demand forecasting and capacity allocation with model readiness, rollout planning, launch coordination, and post-deployment learning. You will also own mode deployment beyond capacity by working with cross functional teams across research, post-training, inference and product to own mainline model deployment.

You will bring structure to constrained-capacity decisions, improve the tooling and mechanisms teams use to prioritize demand, and help new models reach users safely and efficiently. Success requires technical depth, sound judgment under ambiguity, and crisp execution across product, research, infrastructure, and operations teams.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Own cross-functional programs for Chat capacity forecasting, allocation, headroom planning, and constrained-capacity operations.

• Build durable intake, prioritization, and decision mechanisms that connect product demand and model requirements to available serving capacity.

• Partner with product, research, inference, fleet, and capacity teams to develop scenarios, surface tradeoffs, and drive timely allocation decisions.

• Lead model deployment readiness and rollout planning, including serving-capacity allocation, launch sequencing, validation, and operational handoffs.

• Establish clear readiness gates, risk reviews, rollback criteria, and escalation paths for model deployments.

• Drive launch coordination through deployment and post-launch learning, turning recurring gaps and manual work into scalable tooling and operating practices.

• Define and operationalize metrics for forecast accuracy, capacity utilization and headroom, deployment velocity, reliability, latency, quality, and user impact.

• Create concise, decision-ready communications that make dependencies, risks, capacity constraints, and launch choices clear to technical and product leaders.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have led complex technical programs in infrastructure, distributed systems, capacity planning, model serving, or large-scale deployment environments.

• Can reason credibly about demand, supply, headroom, reliability, latency, and quality tradeoffs, and translate them into executable plans.

• Have built operating mechanisms or tooling that replaced fragmented, manual workflows with scalable systems and clear ownership.

• Are effective in high-ambiguity, constrained environments where priorities change and decisions require explicit tradeoffs.

• Build alignment across research, engineering, product, finance or capacity planning, and operations without relying on direct authority.

• Use metrics to guide decisions, identify bottlenecks, and demonstrate measurable improvements in throughput, predictability, or reliability.

• Communicate with precision and can move comfortably between technical detail, operational execution, and executive-level decisions.

• Thrive in ambiguous, scaling environments and can bring order to complex cross-functional work without losing pace.

• Care about OpenAI's mission and about expanding responsible access to advanced AI systems.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s ... 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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