Special Projects Manager, Real Estate and Workplace

About the Team

The Real Estate & Workplace (REW) team at OpenAI designs and manages spaces, programs, and services that empower our employees and advance our mission. Our team covers a diverse range of functions, including leasing, global operations, analytics, construction, workplace experience, and employee services. We strive to support OpenAI’s mission of researching and deploying safe artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity by optimizing the employee experience and maintaining operational excellence and financial discipline through rigorous focus on flexibility, cost effectiveness, intentional design, and scalable, people-centric solutions.

About the Role

We are seeking a highly experienced Special Projects Project Manager to lead and execute multi-threaded, collaborative projects within our dynamic REW team. This role reports to the Head of Design & Construction and involves close collaboration across various REW pillars, including Leasing, Workplace Operations, Workplace Experience, Global Food Programs, and external partners.

This position is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work arrangement requiring a minimum of three days per week in-office. Relocation assistance is available for new hires.

In this role, you will:

• Lead, build, and support critical project management initiatives and programs within the REW team for unique projects such as EBC’s and other speciality construction.

• Drive cross-functional REW alignment, ensuring effective collaboration with Design & Construction and Operations teams to resolve business issues and fulfill requests.

• Own and create scalable programs and processes to address or proactively manage workplace related friction points.

• Support strategic communications and clearly convey challenges, opportunities, solutions, and strategies across various stakeholder levels using multiple communication channels (written, visual, and spoken).

• Support budget management and financial planning in collaboration with REW finance analysts, aligning project goals with financial targets and metrics.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of robust experience in project management, specifically within Design & Construction as well as experience in Workplace/Facilities Management or Strategy

• Exceptional communication skills, adept at presenting complex information clearly and effectively to diverse stakeholders.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, with the foresight to anticipate and address global and organization-wide impacts.

• Proven success managing multiple concurrent projects, consistently meeting deadlines, and maintaining budget integrity.

• Demonstrated capability to collaborate effectively across global teams and diverse functions.

• Experience utilizing project management software for comprehensive planning and budgeting.

• Experience scaling operations from early-stage private companies to larger, more complex organizations is highly advantageous.

• Enthusiastic about innovation, technology, and the safe advancement of artificial intelligence.

• Possess a growth mindset that thrives outside of comfort zones and creates impact in ambiguous and fast-paced environments

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 .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.