About OpenAI Foundation
AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more.
But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.
These are the two dimensions of what we’re building the Foundation to do. We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances.
This work is just beginning. Over the next year, as we quickly ramp up, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs. This includes early investments toward our previously announced $25 billion commitment to curing diseases and AI resilience.
About the Role
We are looking for our founding Head of Talent: a proven talent leader who will own hiring for the Foundation from the ground up. You will be one of the first ten people in the organization, and you will build — and lead — the hiring function that lets us grow fast without lowering the bar.
This is a player-coach role. The right person has led recruiting inside a frontier AI lab or a comparable high-bar organization as it scaled — and is still excellent at the hands-on work. You will personally run our most important searches end to end — scoping, sourcing, closing — across technical, research, program, and operating positions in every Foundation program, while laying the foundations of the team you will grow. You will partner directly with our most senior leaders and report to our Director of Operations.
In this role, you will
- Own full-cycle recruiting across the Foundation, from role scoping and intake through sourcing, candidate experience, offer design, and close.
- Partner with founding leaders across all four programs to turn ambiguous mandates into crisp role definitions, calibrated bars, and structured interview loops.
- Build top-of-funnel from scratch: sourcing strategies, talent maps, and warm pipelines for technical, research, grantmaking, policy, and operating talent.
- Design and run the interview process itself — scorecards, debriefs, calibration — and raise the quality bar as the team grows.
- Close exceptional, mission-aligned people who have other excellent options, by being genuinely fluent in the work and honest about the trade-offs.
- Stand up the recruiting infrastructure a new org needs: ATS and tooling, pipeline reporting, employer brand, and a candidate experience that reflects the seriousness of the mission.
- Hire and lead recruiters if and when the Foundation grows, and own the people foundations that come with the function: leveling, offer frameworks, and a consistent hiring bar across programs.
- Act as a trusted advisor on org design, leveling, and compensation strategy as we scale.
We'd love to hear from you if you
- Have 10+ years in talent, including leading recruiting — as a head of recruiting, director, or founding recruiter — at a frontier AI lab, research organization, or another environment with a famously high bar.
- Have taken an organization through rapid early scaling: joined when the team was small, built the recruiting function and processes from scratch, and grew the people around you — and are energized rather than unsettled by doing it again.
- Have personally hired senior researchers, engineers, and operators, closing against offers from the best companies in the world.
- Can hold your own in a substantive conversation about AI and the mission, enough to earn the trust of researchers, engineers, and senior operators.
- Are a genuinely persuasive closer who wins on substance and relationship, not pressure.
- Operate with discipline and care without needing a large team around you.
- Are deeply mission-aligned and excited to help ensure AGI benefits all of humanity.
It would be great if you also have
- Experience that spans recruiting and people operations — leveling, compensation design, onboarding — so the hiring system and the employee experience grow together.
- Time in mission-driven organizations — nonprofits, philanthropies, climate or safety-focused funds — and a track record of hiring for first-of-their-kind roles.
- Experience advising founders or senior leaders on talent strategy, org design, and compensation.