Frontier AI Research · San Francisco
About this Team
The HR Business Partner (HRBP) team at OpenAI partners with leaders to navigate complex organizational and talent decisions where the right path is not always obvious. We are building a higher-leverage HRBP model: staying close enough to the business to understand its realities, while focusing our time on the work that requires judgment, influence, context, and leadership partnership.
This role is for an HRBP who can diagnose ambiguous situations, translate business strategy into organizational and talent decisions, coach leaders through consequential choices, and help build the operating rhythms that enable scale. While the role spans both strategic and operational work, the bar is not to be helpful on everything. The bar is to improve decision quality, strengthen leadership capability, and increase organizational effectiveness.
We operate with urgency, empathy, and sound judgment. We value sincerity, intellectual honesty, and collaboration over ego, and focus relentlessly on creating meaningful impact.
About this Role
This role is part of a shared hiring pathway for HRBPs at OpenAI. Instead of hiring directly for a single team, we evaluate candidates holistically first, then identify the best fit across our organization as you advance. This approach ensures alignment between your skills, interests, and where our needs are greatest—whether that’s partnering with technical leaders in engineering, supporting product teams driving user impact, or enabling operational excellence across business functions.
As a Senior HR Business Partner, you’ll be a trusted advisor to leaders and their teams. You’ll help set direction for how we organize, grow, and lead—stepping in as both a sounding board and a problem-solver. This role mixes strategic advising with hands-on support: you’ll design better systems, coach managers through complex situations, and help us make trade-offs that keep our people and mission in balance. This is an individual contributor role reporting to an HRBP Lead.
In this role, you will:
Shape high-performing, resilient teams: Partner with leaders to design structures, talent plans, and ways of working that enable strong performance and sustainable growth.
Collaborate for a seamless experience: Partner with fellow HRBPs, COEs, and cross-functional leaders to build an employee experience rooted in humanity, humility, and impact.
Evolve People programs: Strengthen performance, engagement, and retention processes—building solutions that are lightweight, scalable, and aligned with how OpenAI operates.
Guide and develop managers: Offer candid, actionable feedback and help managers build leadership muscle across their teams.
Anticipate and act fast: Stay close to the business to identify challenges early, diagnose root causes, and deliver lasting solutions that adapt as priorities shift.
Lead change that matters: Drive organizational changes with empathy, clarity, and rigor—finding creative paths forward when playbooks don’t exist.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
Deep HRBP expertise: 7–10+ years of HR experience, including at least 5 years as an HR Business Partner in high-growth or complex environments.
Strategic partnering: Able to see the big picture, guide leaders through tough trade-offs, and adapt quickly when priorities shift.
Multipliers who create impact: Skilled at giving candid feedback with care and building leadership capabilities across organizations.
Scrappy problem solving: Uses sound judgment to diagnose challenges, test creative solutions, and chart a path forward without a playbook.
Change leadership with calm & clarity: Brings steadiness, empathy, and influence in moments of ambiguity or transition.
High integrity: Known for discretion, fairness, and trustworthiness when the stakes are high.
Workplace & Location
This role is based in our San Francisco, New York, or Seattle office, and we aren’t considering remote applications at this time. We do encourage you to apply even if you prefer a fully remote role as location factors may change over time.
We offer relocation support to new employees, and we use a hybrid model: three days in the office per week with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays.
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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