Strategy & Operations Manager, Communications

About the Team OpenAI’s Communications team is responsible for helping people understand our mission, technology, and impact. The team works across the company to communicate clearly and thoughtfully with a wide range of audiences in a rapidly evolving environment. Within Communications, the Strategy & Systems team is building a new model for how communications organizations operate—combining strong strategic judgment, effective operating systems, and the growing capabilities of AI. We design the frameworks, tools, and ways of working that help the broader team focus on its highest-impact priorities and execute them effectively. About the Role We are looking for a Strategy & Operations Manager to help make this operating model real. You will translate priorities into action, lead high-impact initiatives from idea through implementation, and design better ways for the Communications team to work. You will take ownership of complex projects that require clear thinking, strong follow-through, and a willingness to challenge how work has traditionally been done. You will partner with senior leaders, technical builders, and cross-functional teams to bring structure to ambiguous problems, strengthen execution, and apply AI in practical ways that improve how the organization operates. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Lead strategic initiatives and special projects across Communications, turning ambiguous opportunities into clearly defined problems, aligned plans, and successful implementation. - Help shape how the team sets priorities, makes decisions, and follows through on its most important work—including launches, campaigns, reactive moments, and longer-term initiatives. - Design an AI-forward approach to project and program management, building systems that maintain momentum, surface risks early, and make ownership and dependencies clear. - Build operating rhythms, planning frameworks, and shared processes that create clarity without adding unnecessary meetings, manual tracking, or layers of coordination. - Translate emerging AI capabilities into practical workflows that reduce repetitive work, strengthen coordination, and allow team members to focus on work that most benefits from human judgment. - Drive the adoption of new tools and ways of working across the Communications organization, partnering with systems builders and team leads to understand user needs and continually improve the experience. - Work closely with senior leaders to translate strategic priorities into clear plans, decisions, milestones, and measurable outcomes. - Build strong partnerships across Communications, Marketing, Global Affairs, Product, and other teams to connect work across organizations and resolve gaps in ownership or execution. - Use data and qualitative insights to evaluate effectiveness, measure impact, and identify opportunities to improve how the team operates. - Help create a culture of clear ownership, thoughtful experimentation, continuous improvement, and high-quality execution. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 10+ years of professional experience, including significant experience in strategy and operations, business operations, program leadership, or a related field. - Have a track record of working closely with senior leaders to drive complex, cross-functional initiatives. - Have led initiatives from an early idea or loosely defined problem through execution and measurable results. - Are energized by the opportunity to rethink how teams work with AI and have experience introducing AI tools, building AI-enabled workflows, or helping an organization adopt new ways of working. - Bring strong strategic judgment and can distinguish high-impact work from activity that creates motion without meaningful progress. - Can translate an ambiguous challenge into a clear plan, align the right stakeholders, and sustain momentum as priorities evolve. - Bring strong analytical skills and experience using data to inform decisions, measure outcomes, and improve organizational effectiveness. - Can partner effectively with technical builders and have experience using agentic, automation, or no-code tools. - Communicate clearly, build trust across functions, and exercise good judgment about when to push for a decision, simplify a process, or pursue a different approach. - Are highly organized and capable of managing multiple complex initiatives without losing sight of strategic context or execution details. - Care deeply about the work of communications and are excited to help build a team that operates at the pace and ambition of OpenAI. 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 applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.