Mergers & Acquisitions Program Manager

Salary: $190K - $240K Employment Type: Full-Time

About the Team

The Strategic Initiatives team is a part of OpenAI’s Recruiting organization and focuses on dynamic, people-driven areas of the company. We lead efforts in Executive Recruiting, Mergers & Acquisitions, Talent Intelligence, High Impact Talent, and Special Projects.

About the Role

As a Mergers & Acquisitions Program Manager within Recruiting, you will be a key partner in managing people cross-functional collaboration from diligence through employee onboarding for M&A deals. This role requires exceptional judgment, speed, and absolute discretion. You will operate at the center of some of OpenAI’s most impactful decisions, shaping the future of the company by bringing in extraordinary, mission-aligned talent.

We are looking for someone who thrives in ambiguity, moves seamlessly between strategic thinking and execution, and is energized by complexity, challenge, and pace.

This role is based either in our San Francisco office or remote. For in-office positions, we utilize a hybrid work model requiring three days per week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design, lead, and scale the M&A People workstream program, driving end-to-end management of timeline, candidate experience, and key touchpoints to enable smooth deal execution and positive onboarding and integration.
• Build and uplevel playbooks, processes, and communications to support increasing deal volume and complexity, creatively solving for new challenges while ensuring clarity, alignment, and efficiency across cross-functional stakeholders (e.g., Recruiting Operations, Comms, Events).
• Deliver a high-impact candidate and acquired team experience, including producing events such as Town Halls, onboarding customizations, and cultural moments that reflect OpenAI’s mission.
• Partner closely with senior leaders, founders, and acquired teams, demonstrating executive presence and the ability to navigate sensitive situations and competing priorities.
• Lead post-mortem retrospectives for People cross-functional teams at both a deal and program level to build repeatable playbooks and process improvements for future deals.
• Liaise with Recruiting Operations and cross-functional partners to build and scale efficient M&A recruiting processes and tools. This may include initiatives related to headcount tracking and allocation, offer creation and issuance, confidentiality workflows, etc.
• Flex into other high-priority areas of Strategic Initiatives as needed.

Qualifications

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 4+ years of experience in program management within Mergers & Acquisitions.
• Possess strong project management skills, including the ability to coordinate across stakeholders, timelines, and tools.
• Have an analytical mindset—confident working with data to track program health and inform decisions.
• Demonstrate a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can exhibit sound judgment in ambiguous situations.
• Have proven success operating with discretion and high judgment on sensitive or high-profile hires.
• Can context-switch and operate at altitude, while still executing with precision.
• Are familiar with technical hiring, especially in research or machine learning domains.
• Possess excellent written and verbal communication skills.

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.