Recruiting Optimization Manager

About the Team
OpenAI’s People team is committed to hiring, engaging, and supporting world-class talent to help safely build and deploy universally beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The Recruiting Optimizations Manager is responsible for building and strengthening the systems, workflows, and operational infrastructure that make hiring at OpenAI fast, rigorous, and scalable. This role partners across recruiting, systems, and people teams to ensure recruiting foundations are efficient, reliable, auditable, and built to scale as OpenAI continues to grow rapidly and globally.

This role leads Recruiting Operations optimization efforts across workflow design, operational automation, systems enablement, and scalable service operations.

About the Role
This role is focused on the systems and operational backbone of recruiting. The Recruiting Operations Manager will lead work across recruiting systems, workflow design, automation, process optimization, and data integrity to improve how hiring runs at scale.

This role will translate business needs into durable operational solutions, drive improvements across the recruiting technology stack, and identify opportunities to reduce manual work through better tooling, automation, and process design. The right person will combine strong people management with systems thinking, operational rigor, and a practical approach to scaling high-quality recruiting infrastructure.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We are not considering remote candidates at this time.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and develop a high-performing Recruiting Operations team, setting clear expectations, building strong judgment, and supporting career growth.

• Own and improve the operational systems and workflows that underpin recruiting, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and efficiency.

• Design, implement, and continuously optimize automations across recruiting workflows, approvals, data quality checks, reporting processes, and systems handoffs.

• Identify manual, repetitive, or error-prone work and convert it into streamlined, governed, and scalable processes.

• Partner with Recruiting, People Systems, and cross-functional stakeholders to prioritize and deliver tooling improvements, workflow redesigns, and operational enhancements.

• Support the evolution of the recruiting technology stack by defining requirements, evaluating solutions, improving integrations, and driving adoption of new processes and tools.

• Use data to monitor process health, identify bottlenecks, and drive continuous improvement across operational performance and system effectiveness.

• Raise the bar on data accuracy, systems hygiene, documentation, and process discipline across recruiting operations.

• Act as an escalation point for complex operational issues, using structured problem-solving and sound judgment to resolve root causes.

• Contribute to an AI-enabled roadmap for recruiting operations, with a focus on practical automation, usability, governance, and measurable impact.

You might thrive in this role if:

• You care deeply about building reliable systems and operational foundations that scale.

• You naturally look for ways to simplify, automate, and optimize workflows rather than maintain manual workarounds.

• You are comfortable operating in ambiguity and can bring structure to evolving processes and systems.

• You know how to lead a team through both day-to-day execution and longer-term systems improvement.

• You bring strong judgment and know when to escalate risks, challenge unclear requirements, or tighten a process that is not holding up.

• You balance speed with rigor and understand that operational quality is a trust function.

• You can zoom out to design scalable workflows and zoom in to debug process failures, systems gaps, or data issues.

• You are credible with stakeholders and able to build strong working relationships across recruiting, systems, analytics, finance, legal, and IT.

What We’re Looking For:

• 8+ years of experience in recruiting operations, talent operations, people systems, or similar operational environments, with prior people management experience.

• Experience leading teams in fast-paced, high-growth environments with a strong focus on systems, process improvement, and operational execution.

• Strong operational design and process optimization skills, with experience scaling recruiting workflows and infrastructure.

• Demonstrated experience building or driving workflow automations, tooling enhancements, systems improvements, or operational redesigns in recruiting or related environments.

• Comfort working across ATS, workflow, integration, and support tooling; experience with platforms such as Ashby, Workday, Guide, or similar systems is a plus.

• Experience using metrics, service levels, and operational reviews to manage performance and uncover opportunities for optimization and automation.

• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, especially with Recruiting, People Systems, Analytics, Finance, Legal, and IT.

• Excellent judgment, prioritization, communication, and attention to detail in high-stakes environments.

• Interest in AI-enabled operations, with a pragmatic approach to adopting new tools and workflows.

  Compensation Range: $216K - $240K USD

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 Affirmative 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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