Technical Program Manager, Applied Engineering

About the Team

The Applied AI team safely brings OpenAI's technology to the world. We released ChatGPT, DALL·E, and the APIs for GPT-4, GPT-3, embeddings, and fine-tuning.

The infrastructure that powers all of this is one of the world's largest inference fleets. We orchestrate enormous quantities of GPUs and supporting infrastructure to serve secure, reliable, highly performant language, image, video, audio models.

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced technical program manager to coordinate complex, org-wide, infrastructure-heavy, projects.

Examples include preparing our products and infrastructure to operate in multiple geographic regions for compliance, security, and reliability reasons. Changes like this require major engineering efforts in every team and require tightly coordinated, cross-functional work streams that you will help coordinate.

Subtle technical constraints and decisions can dramatically impact our ability to operate for years to come. A technical understanding of these nuances and the ability to effectively navigate a rapidly changing org is critical to success.

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:

• Serve as the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for a data locality project, overseeing its execution from inception to completion.
• Anticipate and navigate subtle technical constraints and decisions that could significantly impact long-term operations.
• Foster a collaborative environment, facilitating cross-team communication and problem-solving to address challenges and capitalize on opportunities.
• Operationalize and execute critical cross functional programs spanning many engineering teams as well as external infrastructure partners including Azure teams.
• Create technical roadmaps with milestones and coordinate across teams to deliver against them at all stages of the project lifecycle
• Communicate progress, status and risk effectively to stakeholders internally and externally
• Manage dependencies across multiple teams 
• Develop and implement program management frameworks, and KPIs to achieve goals

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 7+ years experience managing complex technical programs at large scale in Infrastructure with a track record of leading complex, large-scale infrastructure projects.
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure and distributed systems, preferably with exposure to multi-region expansion projects.
• Strong technical acumen, with the ability to understand and navigate the nuances of infrastructure and engineering decisions.
• Exceptional organizational and coordination skills, with a demonstrated ability to manage multiple work streams and stakeholders.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to convey complex technical information clearly and effectively to diverse audiences.
• Ability to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing environment, maintaining focus and delivering results amidst ambiguity.