Technical Program Manager, Applied API & Product

Job description

TECHNICAL PROGRAM MANAGER – APPLIED PRODUCT & PLATFORM 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. Technical Program Managers at OpenAI play a key leadership role in scaling these efforts, partnering deeply with product, engineering, design, and go-to-market teams to bring ambitious ideas to life and ensure clarity and discipline in execution. ABOUT THE ROLE We’re seeking a Technical Program Manager to drive complex, large-scale product and platform initiatives across ChatGPT, API, and related surfaces. This role sits at the intersection of technical strategy and execution. You’ll be responsible for translating product vision into actionable plans, shaping interfaces and experiences from both consumer and developer perspectives, and ensuring successful delivery across web, mobile, and platform layers. You’ll bring deep technical fluency, product sense, and a strong execution track record. You’re comfortable managing ambiguity, influencing architectural direction, advocating for developers, and leading cross-functional delivery with discipline and empathy. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid – 3 days/week in-office) IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Collaborate with product, engineering, and design to shape roadmaps, technical strategies, and long-term platform direction. - Translate product vision into clear, scalable technical execution plans, balancing short-term delivery with long-term platform evolution. - Lead end-to-end execution of cross-functional product and platform programs—from planning through launch and iteration. - Own timelines, milestones, dependency management, risk mitigation, and accountability across teams. - Partner with engineering teams to influence architectural decisions and interface definitions for public and internal APIs. - Understand full-stack systems across client (web, mobile) and server (API, back-end) surfaces to ensure holistic and performant solutions. - Serve as a central coordination point across product, design, engineering, legal, policy, and go-to-market stakeholders. - Ensure alignment on priorities and unblock teams through structured execution and consistent communication. - Deliver crisp and clear updates to technical and executive stakeholders on program health, risks, and tradeoffs. - Influence product and leadership decisions by representing developer and customer perspectives grounded in deep context. - Identify systemic inefficiencies and propose new tools or processes to improve product delivery and cross-team velocity. - Leverage data and AI-powered internal tooling to track progress, surface gaps, and optimize product and developer experiences. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have 10–15+ years of experience driving high-impact technical programs in product and platform domains. - Have strong technical acumen across front-end/client technologies, API development, and scalable systems architecture. - Have successfully delivered developer-facing tools or platforms and can advocate for the end-user and developer experience. - Bring excellent program management discipline—comfortable managing multiple concurrent efforts, leading complex execution, and bringing clarity to ambiguity. - Demonstrate product intuition and can connect user needs to technical tradeoffs and platform decisions. - Are a highly structured and empathetic communicator who fosters alignment and moves cross-functional teams forward. - Are curious, hands-on, and thrive in a fast-moving environment with high trust and high standards. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.