Director of Recruiting Operations

About the Team

OpenAI’s People team is committed to hiring, engaging, and supporting world-class talent to help safely build and deploy universally beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The Director of Recruiting Operations is responsible for building and running the operating system that makes hiring at OpenAI fast, rigorous, and scalable. This role is responsible for all components that underpin every stage of the recruiting process — ensuring that as OpenAI scales rapidly and globally, our foundations remain accurate, auditable, and candidate-centered.

Recruiting Operations (Rec Ops) team consists of three pillars:
Candidate Experience, Interview Programs and Recruiting Systems, which make up the critical machinery behind hiring. The breadth of work that is entrusted to this team is vast – recruiting coordination at extreme volume, interview operations (governance, interviewer training and load balancing), operational tooling, and managing all the execution rhythms that keep hiring sustainable through volatility and growth. This role is accountable for ensuring recruiting operations scales without heroics, and that our systems are robust and sustainable for the next phase of OpenAI’s growth.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We are not considering remote candidates at this time.

• Own and continuously improve the recruiting operating system by establishing a scalable Rec Ops operating model, ensuring focused prioritization, planning, sequencing, execution rhythms, escalation paths, and accountability.

• Build a consistent, highly reliable candidate experience where recruiting coordination runs at high velocity and backlogs or fire drills are rare exceptions.

• Build a world-class interview operations program that is strategic and continuously improving the interviewer experience and capability in response to our growth.

• Lead, develop and grow a high-performing global Recruiting Operations team, setting clear standards, driving accountability, and building strong operational judgment.

• Build an AI-native roadmap for recruiting operations that spans key hiring process touchpoints (scheduling, interviewer operations, approvals, candidate experience, data and quality assurance, and support tooling)

• Raise the bar on automation with a bias toward secure, reliable, governed systems and drive tight integration across recruiting tools and workflows to ensure data accuracy and scalability.

• Evaluate and optimize existing and new recruiting systems and vendors – ensuring they meet the needs of a rapidly growing, global organization.

• Partner with key stakeholders like the People Analytics, Strategic Finance and Recruiting teams to translate headcount forecasts into executable hiring plans that understand resourcing requirements, constraints and system bottlenecks.

• Drive system-of-record hygiene across recruiting tooling in partnership with People systems and operations teams.

• Act as a trusted, systems-oriented leader through periods of expansive growth.

• You are someone who takes operational excellence personally and understands that in a company like OpenAI, accuracy, consistency, and compliance are trust functions.

• You are comfortable operating in a fast-changing environment where priorities shift, inputs are imperfect, and the cost of error is high.

• You bring strong judgment and are willing to raise risks, ask hard questions, and push back when something is not ready or defensible.

• You know how to bring structure without slowing the organization down.

• You balance empathy with rigor, and believe that the best candidate experience is built on clear communication, process consistency, and systems that scale.

• You can zoom out to design scalable systems and zoom in to debug complex operational issues when things break.

• You are calm, decisive, and credible with senior leaders, even in moments of pressure or uncertainty.

• 12+ years of progressive experience within talent operations, systems or equivalent operational leadership roles.

• Deep experience designing and building recruiting operations at scale globally

• Strong…