Project Manager, Recruiting Operations

Project Manager

OpenAI's Recruiting Operations (RecOps) team designs and runs the systems that make recruiting seamless, data-driven, and scalable. We partner with Recruiters, Sourcers, Coordinators, and Recruiting Leads to ensure hiring is both efficient and high-quality, enabling the company to grow with world-class talent.

This Project Manager role is unique: you will be embedded directly with our Recruiting Leads, acting as the connective tissue between RecOps and frontline recruiting leadership. You'll bring structure, visibility, and operational excellence to initiatives that span both recruiting and operations, ensuring RecOps priorities are tightly aligned with the needs of our Leads.

You'll be one of two Project Managers in RecOps: your focus will be supporting Recruiting Leads directly, while your counterpart PM drives structure and coordination across the broader recruiting org.

As a Project Manager within Recruiting Operations, you'll oversee high-priority initiatives for Recruiting Leads, serving as the day-to-day driver for their projects. You'll own project plans, milestone tracking, and risk management while surfacing updates and blockers to both RecOps and recruiting leadership.

Your role is a mix of project execution (running trackers, timelines, calendars, and updates), strategic alignment (ensuring Lead priorities are connected to RecOps), and stakeholder management (keeping Recruiting Leads, RecOps, Enablement, and cross-functional partners coordinated).

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, following a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role, You Will:

• Embed with Recruiting Leads: Serve as the dedicated RecOps partner for Leads, ensuring their hiring priorities are translated into structured project plans.
• Coordinate Cross-Functional Recruiting Projects: Drive execution of initiatives that span RecOps, Recruiting Leads, Finance/StratFin, and People Ops. Lead kick-offs, checkpoints, and retrospectives.
• Maintain Project Trackers, Milestones & Calendars: Keep timelines, deliverables, and dependencies on track; proactively flag risks, bottlenecks, or resourcing needs. Manage RecOps calendars to align project timelines with tool rollouts, ensuring smooth coordination across the team.
• Partner with Enablement: Work with the Enablement team to plan trainings and rollout support, ensuring new tools and processes are effectively adopted by recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators.
• Support Team Organization: Assist Recruiting Leads in organizing their teams' projects and priorities, helping them structure initiatives in alignment with RecOps practices.
• Bridge RecOps & Recruiting Leadership: Surface updates, blockers, and decision points to RecOps PMs and Recruiting leadership, ensuring alignment and visibility.
• Provide Reporting & Insights: Deliver weekly progress updates for RecOps and Leads, leveraging data from Ashby, Airtable, and Snowflake in partnership with RecOps analytics.
• Support Continuous Improvement: Identify opportunities to streamline workflows and improve efficiency; recommend process enhancements or pilot small improvements.

We're Looking for a Blend of:

• Project Management Execution: 5 - 7 years managing recruiting, HR, or cross-functional operational projects.
• Strong Communication & Stakeholder Skills: Skilled at building trust with stakeholders, driving clarity, and ensuring follow-through across technical and non-technical partners.
• Organizational Discipline: Adept at running multiple project plans, managing calendars, maintaining documentation, and ensuring accountability.
• Data Oriented & Tool Fluent: Experience with ATS/CRM systems (Ashby preferred), Airtable, and collaboration tools (Slack, Docs). Comfortable using data to inform decisions.
• Adaptability & Problem-Solving: Thrive in a fast-paced environment where priorities shift quickly; proactive in surfacing issues and unblocking progress.
• Team Orientation: Excited to collaborate with fellow PMs, RecOps Specialists, Enablement partners, and Recruiting Leads in service of shared goals.

Why You'll Love This Role:

• Connective Tissue: You'll be the go-to partner for Recruiting Leads, driving execution of their most critical initiatives.
• Collaboration at Scale: Work at the intersection of RecOps, recruiting leadership, Enablement, and cross-functional partners.
• Professional Growth: Learn directly from experienced PMs while building your own portfolio of projects.
• Mission Alignment: Help OpenAI hire the world-class team required to responsibly advance AI.

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.