People Innovation Labs is a fast-moving engineering team embedded in OpenAI’s People Team. We build the systems, products, and AI-native workflows that help OpenAI find, grow, support, and retain exceptional talent.
We work across recruiting, HR, culture, knowledge, performance, and employee experience to rethink how the People Team should operate in the age of AI. Some of what we build are durable internal products; some begin as prototypes, automations, workflows, or experiments with the potential to become software products over time.
About the Role
We’re looking for a Product Manager focused on AI enablement, prototyping, and product discovery within the People Team. This person will act as a forward deployed PM for People Innovation Labs: embedded with OpenAI’s People Team, close to the work, and responsible for finding the highest-leverage opportunities where AI can meaningfully improve how OpenAI operates.
You’ll partner with subject matter experts within the People Team to identify pain points, prototype new AI-powered workflows, help colleagues adopt emerging tools, and determine which ideas should remain lightweight enablement versus graduate into durable products built and maintained by PIL engineering. The role sits at the intersection of product, AI enablement, internal operations, and hands-on exploration.
This is ideal for someone who is builder-minded, highly trusted by operators, comfortable in ambiguous problem spaces, and able to move fluidly from “let’s try this today” to “this should become a real product.”
In this role, you will
Act as the product lead embedded within the People Team, helping identify, prototype, and scale high-impact AI use cases across recruiting, HR, culture, talent, and company-wide operations.
Partner closely with People Team subject matter experts to understand workflows in depth, uncover friction, and translate operational needs into AI-native solutions.
Build, test, or shape lightweight prototypes using OpenAI tools, internal systems, no-code/low-code workflows, agents, automations, or other fast experimentation methods.
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Help the People Team adopt and use AI effectively, including developing patterns, playbooks, examples, and lightweight enablement materials.
Identify which prototypes, workflows, or repeated pain points should become durable software products owned by PIL engineering.
Translate successful explorations into clear product briefs, requirements, success criteria, and handoff plans for engineering and design.
Work with PIL engineers to evaluate technical feasibility, sequence investments, and make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, quality, privacy, security, and maintainability.
Maintain a portfolio view of AI enablement opportunities within the People Team, distinguishing between experiments, one-off tools, scalable workflows, and product candidates.
Build trusted relationships with People Team leaders, operators, and technical partners, serving as connective tissue between frontline needs and product strategy.
Define success metrics for prototypes and launched products, including adoption, time saved, workflow quality, user satisfaction, and operational impact.
Bring learnings from People Team workflows back into PIL’s broader product roadmap and, where relevant, into OpenAI’s understanding of how AI changes knowledge work.
You might thrive in this role if you
Have 5+ years of experience in product management, technical product strategy, founder/operator roles, AI enablement, solutions/product lead roles, or similar work that combines product judgment with hands-on execution.
Are energized by ambiguous, high-context environments where the right answer may start as a scrappy prototype before becoming a roadmap item.
Have strong product instincts and can tell the difference between a useful one-off workflow, a scalable internal pattern, and a product worth engineering investment.
Are highly credible with both technical and non-technical audiences, including engineers, People Team leaders, operators, and subject matter experts.
Are builder-minded and comfortable getting hands-on with AI tools, agents, automations, prompts, lightweight integrations, or prototypes to unblock learning.
Communicate clearly and crisply, whether writing a product brief, synthesizing user research, documenting a prototype, or aligning stakeholders on a decision.
Can quickly understand complex operational workflows and translate them into simple, useful product concepts.
Use both qualitative insight and data to evaluate whether an AI-enabled workflow is actually improving quality, speed, consistency, or user experience.
Have a strong bias toward action while knowing when to slow down for privacy, security, reliability, or organizational change management.
Are curious about how the People function works and excited to help define what world-class talent systems look like when powered by frontier AI.
Have experience with recruiting, HR, employee experience, internal tools, workflow automation, or operationally intensive products. This is helpful but not required.
Bring sound judgment about when to enable the team directly, when to prototype, and when to push for durable software owned by engineering.
What We’re Looking For
Strong product judgment in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
High AI fluency and curiosity about applying frontier models to real operational work.
Ability to prototype, experiment, and learn quickly without overbuilding.
Excellent stakeholder management across technical and non-technical partners.
Strong written communication and product documentation.
Comfort operating across strategy, execution, enablement, and hands-on problem solving.
A track record of turning messy workflows into clear opportunities, usable systems, and measurable impact.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf
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.
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