Senior Project Manager, Design and Construction

About the Team

The Real Estate team at OpenAI is responsible for delivering workplaces that exist at the intersection of operational excellence and elevated aesthetics, and managing OpenAI’s real estate portfolio to ensure that the organization is well-positioned for success in pursuit of our mission.

About the Role

As a Project Manager on the Design and Construction team, you will have the unique opportunity to shape OpenAI’s global footprint and drive the growth of the Design and Construction team. You’ll manage the full lifecycle of commercial construction projects, from initial design to final handover, and collaborate with internal and external partners to keep our expansion plans running at peak efficiency.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, but you will be expected to travel to project sites on occasion. 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:

• Oversee and execute a wide range of projects simultaneously—from complex retrofits to large-scale buildouts—ensuring each is accurately defined, adequately staffed, and delivered on time and within budget, while also leading critical project management initiatives and specialty programs (such as EBCs and other unique construction efforts).

• Collaborate cross-functionally with teams like Real Estate, Corporate Security, IT, Finance, and external stakeholders, including contractors and architects.

• Manage capital budget planning, variance tracking, and financial reporting for all projects.

• Conduct detailed project estimating, budgeting, and financial analysis to ensure fiscal responsibility and efficiency.

• Engage in continuous improvement initiatives to evolve our design and construction processes.

• Engage and actively manage external vendors to deliver high-quality work.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 5+ years of experience delivering commercial interiors and workplace environments, including tenant improvement (TI) projects ranging from small flex spaces through large-scale or multi-building campus buildouts from 100,000 - 1 million sqft.

• Bring a background in architecture, interior design, construction project management and have directly managed TI projects in hyper scaling tech companies.

• Have led multiple concurrent projects across geographies, with a track record of delivering on time, within budget, and to a high design standard.

• Possess deep expertise in construction budgeting, forecasting, and financial analysis, with the ability to communicate cost drivers to non-technical stakeholders.

• Excel at building relationships with external vendors, consultants, GCs, and internal teams, and can drive accountability across disciplines.

• Demonstrate strong leadership, ownership, and collaboration skills, with the ability to align diverse teams toward a unified project vision.

• Lead vendor management and contract administration, including sourcing, negotiating, and managing agreements to ensure compliance, cost-effectiveness, and alignment with project goals

• Are an exceptional communicator—clear, concise, and confident in written, verbal, and large-group presentation settings, including with senior executives and high-level stakeholders.

• Thrive in a high-performance, fast-paced culture where time, energy, and attention to detail are in constant demand across multiple priorities and projects.

Compensation Range: $216K - $240K USD

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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