Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Work on frontier model evaluation sits at an increasingly important intersection of SaaS product delivery, reliability, and responsible deployment. This Technical Program Manager role is notable because it treats evaluation as core infrastructure, not a side task, spanning benchmark design, data workflows, and cross-functional coordination. In a market where AI capabilities are shipping into customer-facing software quickly, the ability to operationalise rigorous evals is becoming a differentiator for SaaS teams building with advanced models.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value is exposure to the systems that translate research outputs into repeatable, measurable product quality. The remit blends program leadership with hands-on technical execution, which maps well to modern SaaS environments where PMO, data operations, and engineering practices converge. Experience building lightweight workflows, managing human data campaigns, and creating operating rhythms is broadly transferable to roles focused on platform maturity, experimentation, and quality gates for AI features.
This role fits professionals who enjoy turning ambiguous questions into concrete plans and are comfortable owning both coordination and execution. It will suit someone who prefers working close to technical detail, can navigate many stakeholders, and is motivated by work where success depends on clarity, measurement, and follow-through rather than polished process alone.
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
OpenAI’s Frontier Evals team designs and builds evaluations that measure the capabilities, limitations, and emerging behaviors of our most advanced models. As a research team, we advance both the science and infrastructure of model evaluation, developing methods, systems, and datasets that help us understand where frontier models succeed, where they fail, and what those results imply for future development and deployment.
About the Role
As a Technical Program Manager on Frontier Evals, you will drive high-priority evaluation and research programs from concept through design, execution, and analysis. This is a hybrid IC and program management role: you will help design evals, build lightweight technical workflows, manage human data campaigns, create project roadmaps, track execution, and coordinate across researchers, engineers, data teams, vendors, and domain experts. You should be comfortable ramping quickly on unfamiliar topics, turning open-ended research questions into concrete plans, and doing the hands-on work required to make progress before perfect infrastructure exists. The right person is operationally strong, highly resourceful, and excited to work on research projects where the path is not already defined.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We require 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Manage frontier evaluation projects from initial research questions to delivered benchmarks.
Partner with researchers and engineers to translate ambiguous model capability questions into concrete eval designs, success metrics, timelines, and execution plans.
Design and manage human data campaigns, including task design, trainer or expert instructions, and quality control workflows.
Do hands-on technical work where needed, including prompt iteration, model-based evaluation workflows, data analysis, lightweight scripting, dashboarding, and debugging eval pipelines.
Build roadmaps and operating rhythms that keep fast-moving research efforts aligned and unblocked.
Coordinate across research, engineering, human data, product, safety, legal, external vendors, and domain experts to deliver high-quality evals under tight timelines.
Ramp quickly on new domains and project areas, identifying what needs to be learned, who needs to be involved, and whatever is required to complete the project.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have experience in technical program management, research operations, data operations, evaluation, or a similarly ambiguous technical execution role.
Are proficient enough in Python, SQL, or similar tools to analyze datasets, inspect model outputs, automate workflows, and unblock yourself without waiting on engineering support for every step.
Have a strong understanding of how large language models work, including prompting, model evaluation, grading, and common failure modes.
Are excited to work as both an IC and a program manager: writing analysis scripts one day, aligning stakeholders the next, and then redesigning a data campaign or eval rubric when results reveal a flaw.
Can quickly turn vague research goals into clear plans, crisp milestones, owners, risks, and decision points.
Are relentlessly resourceful: you find partial, scrappy, technically sound ways to make progress while helping teams build more scalable systems over time.
Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders, especially when explaining tradeoffs, uncertainty, quality risks, and research findings.
Learn new technical domains quickly and enjoy context switching across multiple high-priority projects.
Care deeply about building rigorous evaluations that help OpenAI understand and safely deploy increasingly capable models.
Compensation Range: $207K - $230K 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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