Legal Program Manager

About the role

About the Team

OpenAI’s Legal team helps advance our mission by tackling novel legal issues in AI. Our team brings together professionals across technology, privacy, intellectual property, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation. Our regulatory compliance work turns legal requirements into practical programs that support responsible AI development and deployment.

About the Role

As a Legal Program Manager, you will independently manage assigned programs and workstreams across Legal priorities, with a focus on emerging user risk. Your portfolio may include sensitive user escalations, intake and response workflows, and improvements informed by recurring issues, with the mix evolving alongside team needs.

You will partner with counsel, senior legal program managers, and technical and business teams to establish priorities and scope, then drive day-to-day execution. You’ll organize information, coordinate partners, and move open questions toward decisions. As you develop expertise, you’ll take on more ambiguous projects and build repeatable processes that help teams work more effectively.

This full-time role is based in San Francisco, CA, or New York, NY. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Independently manage assigned legal programs and workstreams: define plans, owners, milestones, and dependencies within agreed scope, anticipate blockers, and drive execution.

• Translate counsel’s and specialist teams’ guidance into repeatable workflows, playbooks, and documentation. Depending on your portfolio, this may include intake, sensitive user escalations, information gathering, and response coordination.

• Build strong partnerships across Legal, Product, Safety, User Operations, Policy, and other teams to clarify ownership, coordinate handoffs, and drive commitments through completion.

• Clarify open questions, gather and verify information, synthesize partner input, and bring recommendations and tradeoffs to the appropriate decision-makers. Escalate decisions that require changes to priorities, scope, or resources.

• Maintain a reliable source of truth for matters, source documents, owners, deadlines, decisions, and actions. Provide concise reporting on progress, blockers, and decisions needed.

• Identify recurring issues and execution gaps, propose practical improvements, and lead agreed changes through implementation and adoption. Use tools and automation thoughtfully, verify outputs, and assess improvements in quality, timeliness, and partner effort.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have demonstrated experience independently managing programs or projects from planning through delivery in legal operations, business operations, compliance, policy, investigations, or a related field.

• Have experience coordinating work across teams, maintaining reliable records, and driving open questions and actions to resolution. Experience working with an in-house legal team or in a technology environment is a plus.

• Have improved a recurring workflow, documented the change, and helped others adopt it. You can explain what improved and how you assessed the result.

• Take ownership of execution, set and achieve milestones, anticipate dependencies, and follow through without frequent direction.

• Bring strong organizational, analytical, and communication skills. Exercise sound judgment under pressure, adapt to changing priorities, and know when to proceed independently or seek guidance.

• Handle sensitive information and difficult subject matter with discretion and care, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and recognize when counsel or specialist input is needed.

• Are resourceful and hands-on, with enthusiasm for AI technology and the ability to learn unfamiliar subject areas, use AI tools thoughtfully, and verify their outputs.

• Bring familiarity with user safety, legal escalations, preservation, incident response, or operational data as a plus. Prior ownership of a user-risk program or specialist harm expertise is not required.

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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