People Systems Lead

About the Team

The People Technology team builds and operates the systems that support how OpenAI hires, develops, and supports its people. The team brings together People Systems and People Innovation Labs, a product engineering group focused on rethinking how we find and retain exceptional talent and help employees do their best work.

People Systems owns the company’s core people-technology ecosystem, including platforms such as Workday and Ashby. People Innovation Labs builds new employee and People Team experiences on top of that foundation, including OpenHouse, our internal employee hub, and AI-powered products and automations.

Together, we are working toward a model in which our enterprise systems provide reliable data, controls, and core business logic, while employees and managers can complete more of their work through simple, integrated, and AI-native experiences.

About the Role

We are looking for a People Systems Lead to manage the People Systems team and shape how our core systems evolve.

You will be responsible for the reliability and effectiveness of our current environment while helping us move beyond the constraints of traditional enterprise software. This includes stabilizing and improving platforms such as Workday and Ashby, designing the integrations that connect them to the broader technology ecosystem, and partnering with People Innovation Labs to surface workflows through OpenHouse, Slack, and AI-powered experiences.

This role requires someone who is comfortable moving between strategy, technical design, and team leadership. You should understand People systems deeply, be able to work through integration and architecture decisions with engineers, and translate complex organizational needs into scalable solutions. You will also manage vendor relationships, develop the People Systems team, and drive alignment across People, Engineering, Finance, Security, Legal, and other partners.

This role could be a fit for someone who has grown up in People Systems and developed strong technical depth, or someone with an engineering, product, or integration-platform background who has meaningful experience with HR technology. We care more about your ability to rethink how these systems should work than whether you have followed a traditional People Systems career path.

In this role, you will

• Lead and develop the People Systems team, creating clear ownership, strong operating practices, and opportunities for people to grow.

• Set the strategy and roadmap for OpenAI’s People systems, balancing immediate operational needs with longer-term architectural change.

• Own the configuration, reliability, and ongoing operation of core platforms, including Workday and Ashby.

• Lead complex systems initiatives that span multiple teams and translate organizational needs into scalable technical solutions.

• Design and guide integrations across People systems, internal products, data platforms, and the broader company technology ecosystem.

• Partner closely with People Innovation Labs to build employee and manager experiences on top of enterprise back ends.

• Help move the People technology ecosystem toward a more headless model, allowing workflows to be surfaced through OpenHouse, Slack, and AI agents while preserving appropriate systems of record and controls.

• Improve the stability and effectiveness of critical People systems.

• Strengthen data quality, security, auditability, controls, and operational readiness as the company scales.

• Lead vendor relationships, including product strategy discussions, quarterly business reviews, performance management, and escalations.

• Build alignment across People, Engineering, Finance, Security, Legal, and other stakeholders.

• Communicate technical choices, risks, and tradeoffs clearly to senior leaders.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have deep experience with People systems and the workflows they support, ideally including significant Workday experience.

• Have led a People Systems, HR technology, enterprise applications, or similarly technical systems team.

• Have hands-on experience designing and managing integrations rather than only administering vendor tools.

• Can reason about APIs, data flows, system boundaries, permissions, reliability, and failure handling.

• Have built or supported custom interfaces, workflow layers, or internal products on top of enterprise systems.

• Approach systems work with a product mindset and look beyond the default experience provided by a vendor.

• Can translate ambiguous business needs into clear systems requirements and scalable solutions.

• Have developed and delivered a systems roadmap involving multiple teams, dependencies, and competing priorities.

• Work effectively with engineers and can challenge technical assumptions without needing to write every component yourself.

• Have led complex vendor relationships and know how to use business reviews, product feedback, and performance measures to improve outcomes.

• Can balance innovation with the reliability, security, and controls required of systems that support payroll, recruiting, compensation, and other critical processes.

• Are an experienced people manager who sets clear expectations, coaches senior team members, and addresses performance issues directly.

• Communicate clearly with both technical and nontechnical audiences and can drive decisions across groups with different priorities.

• Are excited to explore how AI can change the way enterprise systems and People teams operate.

Direct experience with every platform in our environment is not required. We are interested in candidates from People Systems, engineering management, enterprise product, and integration-platform backgrounds who can bring both technical credibility and a strong understanding of how People systems work.

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.

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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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