Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Technical Program Manager role sits at a point where advanced AI work intersects with the operational discipline needed to ship reliable, customer facing SaaS products. Within the wider SaaS ecosystem, model safety and robustness increasingly function like platform quality: a prerequisite for adoption, enterprise trust, and sustainable deployment. The remit to turn ambiguous risk signals into structured programs reflects a maturing phase of AI productisation, where research outputs must translate into repeatable processes.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is learning how to operationalise uncertainty. Coordinating across research, engineering, and deployment builds fluency in cross functional execution, roadmap shaping, and measurement design, all core to modern SaaS platform roles. Designing evaluations and tracking performance over time also develops a systems mindset that transfers to reliability, trust and safety, and governance work across subscription software businesses.
This listing is best suited to professionals who enjoy creating clarity when requirements are incomplete and who prefer influence through alignment rather than direct line management. It fits someone comfortable being technically conversant while primarily driving programs, artifacts, and decision cadence. The on site expectation in San Francisco also signals a role for candidates who value frequent collaboration with specialized stakeholders.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Human Data team at OpenAI is responsible for identifying and mitigating risks in advanced AI systems by designing evaluations, surfacing vulnerabilities, and collaborating closely with researchers to strengthen model reliability and public trust.
About the Role
As a Technical Program Manager, you will lead initiatives that test the safety and robustness of OpenAI’s models through creative experimentation and structured evaluation. You’ll coordinate efforts across research and engineering teams to transform ambiguous risks into concrete research programs and influence future model development and deployment.
We’re looking for people who are technically savvy, comfortable with ambiguity, and excited about shaping the future of safe AI.
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:
Lead programs that explore unexpected model behaviors and identify failure modes.
Translate vague or emergent risk signals into clear priorities and actionable research plans.
Design and run creative evaluations, experiments, and red-teaming campaigns.
Collaborate with research, product, and deployment teams to integrate findings into model training and deployment cycles.
Develop repeatable systems for tracking model performance and understanding emerging behavior patterns.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong experience in technical program management, with excellent organizational and communication skills.
Are familiar with large language models, prompt engineering, or model evaluation techniques.
Are comfortable managing fast-paced, high-uncertainty projects and shaping them from the ground up.
Are creative and resourceful in devising new methods for testing model behavior and performance.
Can effectively coordinate across technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive alignment and execution.
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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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.