Senior Legal Discovery Program Manager

About the Team OpenAI’s Legal team helps advance our mission by navigating novel and foundational legal issues in AI. Our Litigation and Regulatory team works on complex, high-stakes matters and partners across the company to build the systems and practices that support them. Our discovery function brings together legal expertise, technology, and operational judgment to meet today’s needs and prepare for continued growth. About the Role We’re seeking an experienced Senior Legal Discovery Program Manager to help shape and scale the discovery capabilities supporting OpenAI’s growing litigation, regulatory, and investigations docket. You’ll drive strategic initiatives across discovery operations and strategy, vendor management, and information governance. You’ll partner closely with our litigation and regulatory teams, other legal teams, technical partners, outside counsel, and vendors to turn complex challenges into practical solutions. Your primary focus will be program building and improvement, along with providing support and guidance on complex legal matters. You’ll also shape how OpenAI approaches discovery and bring AI-enabled ways of working into practice. This role is based in San Francisco or New York. 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’ll: - Build and advance OpenAI’s discovery program including scalable operations, core processes and standards, external vendor management and strategy, information governance programs, and other discovery initiatives across the company. - Partner with Legal, Engineering, IT, Security, Privacy and other teams to translate legal requirements into practical solutions, tooling, integrations, and preservation workflows. - Drive AI and agentic discovery initiatives, from identifying use cases through evaluation, piloting, and adoption, with clear measures of quality, reliability, and impact. - Provide guidance on complex discovery matters and escalations, partnering with case teams, external counsel, and other partners on execution. - Track program outcomes and communicate priorities, risks, resource needs, and recommendations to stakeholders and leadership to continuously improve the program. To be successful in this role, you should have: - 10+ years of relevant experience in discovery, litigation support, legal operations, or related work, including significant ownership of complex discovery programs. - Experience leading projects and programs at a fast-paced technology company, with a track record of building and launching programs from the ground up. - Deep understanding of the discovery lifecycle, from preservation and collection through review and production, and the practical needs of litigation, regulatory matters, and investigations. - Strong working knowledge of eDiscovery platforms, enterprise data systems, and information governance; the ability to work with technical teams on requirements, integrations, and troubleshooting. - Experience managing discovery vendors and outside counsel, assessing service quality and costs, and driving improvements when delivery falls short. - Excellent program management and analytical skills: you can prioritize competing needs, manage dependencies, establish milestones, and turn data into decisions. - Clear written and verbal communication, sound judgment, and the ability to build trust and influence partners without direct authority. - A strong sense of ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a practical, resourceful approach to solving problems. - You are excited to learn and apply AI to legal 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. 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 applican