Head of Talent

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.

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.

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 part of the founding team 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.

• 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…