Program Manager - Local Community Impact

About the team

Our Community team builds direct relationships with people who use OpenAI’s technology, helps others learn from their experiences, and brings their insights back to product and research teams. Our programs connect communities with trusted partners who help organizations adopt AI effectively.

About the role

We’re hiring a Program Manager to build and run our partner network. You will turn an early program into a reliable operation: recruit and onboard partners, coordinate agreements and payments, manage external service providers, support local events and marketing, review service quality, and improve the program as we learn.

This partner network will be on the ground in communities helping people–from small businesses, non-profits, and community organizations–experience concrete benefits from our technology. They will set up useful workflows, learn OpenAI tools and become more confident, independent users.

You should be as comfortable helping a partner resolve an onboarding issue as you are designing the systems that prevent it from happening again. You will work with local operators and internal teams to make sure commitments are clear, work gets done, and the people we serve receive useful, high-quality support.

What you will do

• Build the partner operating model, from sourcing and selection of partners through onboarding, ongoing support, renewal and exit. Establish clear expectations, owners, timelines and escalation paths. Create a scalable operating model that supports program growth and evolving partner needs.

• Run partner onboarding with Legal, Finance and Procurement: track agreements, required information, vendor setup, readiness and start dates so partners can begin work and receive payments through approved processes.

• Manage partner payments, reporting and related operational processes.

• Plan and support local workshops, deployments and events with partners. Coordinate audiences, venues, budgets, materials, staffing and follow-up while preserving local ownership.

• Coordinate program marketing and communications with Community, Marketing and content partners. Develop clear partner guidance, route brand and messaging approvals, and help useful stories and practices reach the right audiences.

• Build trusted relationships with local operators and the organizations they serve. Coach partners, answer questions, address service-quality concerns and set clear boundaries around access, funding and program participation.

• Create practical systems for the partner community: intake, a shared knowledge base, service logs, regular check-ins and reusable playbooks that reduce manual work without sacrificing quality.

• Develop and operate partner review processes with the hiring manager and relevant teams. Combine verified service delivery, beneficiary feedback and sustained product use to understand performance and improve support.

• Collaborate with analytics and product teams to assess program impact using appropriate data and feedback.

• Manage budgets, vendors, risks and dependencies across the program. Keep stakeholders informed, surface decisions early and bring recurring partner feedback into program and product improvements.

You might thrive in this role if you

• 8+ years owning a complex partner, community or operational program from early design through execution at scale, with clear examples of what you personally built and improved.

• Bring strong operational judgment and follow-through across onboarding, financial workflows, events and multiple stakeholder groups.

• Can earn trust with small-business owners, local technical operators and community leaders, explain expectations plainly and have difficult conversations when needed.

• Have practical familiarity with ChatGPT, Codex and AI-enabled workflows, and can work credibly with technical specialists while explaining tools to people with less technical experience.

• Use data and qualitative feedback to distinguish meaningful outcomes from activity counts, and can improve a process without making it unnecessarily bureaucratic.

• Write clearly, communicate risks early, work independently through ambiguity and collaborate effectively across teams.

• Have experience creating playbooks, support systems or automation that lets a high-touch program scale.

Nice to Have

• Operating a local-services, small-business, nonprofit, fellowship, ambassador or distributed partner program.

• Coordinating vendor onboarding, invoices, budgets or grant-like payment workflows with Finance and Legal.

• Running hands-on workshops or community events and translating successful local practices into reusable resources.

• Working across marketing, product, analytics and public-policy or regional teams.

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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