Technical Program Manager, Developer Velocity

ABOUT THE TEAM The Product & Platform teams at OpenAI are responsible for delivering the company’s most impactful offerings—such as ChatGPT, our API platform, and new enterprise capabilities—to a global and diverse customer base. These systems must perform at scale and deliver exceptional experiences to developers, consumers, and businesses alike. The ChatGPT engineering org builds and operates the systems that bring product improvements to users across backend services, web, mobile, and desktop platforms. The Developer Velocity team partners with product engineering, platform, infrastructure, reliability, engineering acceleration, and observability teams to make everyday development faster and releases safer, more predictable, and easier to operate. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to improve developer velocity and deployment excellence across ChatGPT. You will lead durable improvements to local development, CI, testing, build systems, release trains, progressive rollout, and post-deployment validation. You will identify the highest-leverage sources of engineering friction, align teams around shared standards and metrics, and drive adoption of tooling and workflows that improve both speed and reliability. This role combines systems thinking, technical program leadership, and hands-on operating rigor across a broad engineering surface. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. 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: - Own the cross-functional roadmap for improving local development, CI, testing, build workflows, and release infrastructure. - Create a durable intake and prioritization mechanism for developer friction, using evidence to focus teams on the highest-impact improvements. - Lead programs that improve deployment speed and safety, including pre-merge confidence, progressive rollout, release guardrails, rollback readiness, and post-deploy validation. - Improve the reliability and predictability of release trains across ChatGPT backend services, web, mobile, and desktop platforms. - Partner with platform, infrastructure, reliability, engineering acceleration, and observability teams to reduce deployment-related incidents and regressions. - Increase visibility into what is shipping when, and make cross-platform dependencies and launch risks clear to engineers, product managers, and launch owners. - Define and operationalize metrics for developer productivity, build and test health, deployment throughput, release reliability, and engineering velocity. - Drive adoption of automation, observability, release orchestration, and scalable developer tooling, with clear ownership and sustained operating cadences. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have led complex technical programs spanning developer infrastructure, CI/CD, build and test systems, release engineering, or distributed systems. - Can engage deeply with engineers on workflow architecture, deployment systems, rollout risk, observability, and operational tradeoffs. - Have delivered measurable improvements in developer velocity, deployment throughput, release reliability, or engineering efficiency. - Know how to turn fragmented ownership and recurring manual work into durable mechanisms, standards, and tooling with strong adoption. - Use data and qualitative evidence to prioritize work, define useful metrics, and distinguish real productivity gains from local optimization. - Lead effectively across platform and product teams, resolve ambiguity, and keep multi-team execution moving without direct authority. - Use metrics to guide decisions, identify bottlenecks, and demonstrate measurable improvements in throughput, predictability, or reliability. - Communicate with precision and can move comfortably between technical detail, operational execution, and executive-level decisions. - Thrive in ambiguous, scaling environments and can bring order to complex cross-functional work without losing pace. - Care about OpenAI's mission and about expanding responsible access to advanced AI systems. 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 proprie