Mission Deployment Strategist

About the Role

This is a senior strategy and research role responsible for shaping, designing, and guiding emerging initiatives to distribute benefits of AI. It acts as the connective tissue between long-term mission setting by executive leadership and the day-to-day execution of operational teams. This role ensures that early-stage programs are strategically grounded, well-designed, and positioned to scale — linking vision to operational reality. Executing this role requires partnering with senior leaders at the company, across the industry, and in non-profits, and being able to speak fluently with technologists, policy leaders, and financial stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Define strategic evaluation frameworks in partnership with senior leadership — aligning the mission with success metrics, program evaluation criteria, and partner selection processes. Translate mission into actionable priorities.

• Conduct zero-to-one program research, surfacing high-potential areas where the company could intervene. Build institutional knowledge across emerging domains and filter ideas into a coherent pipeline of strategic opportunities.

• Design new initiatives, ensuring they are tightly aligned with strategic priorities, technically feasible, and operationally grounded. Develop logic models, evaluation metrics, and incentive structures for early-stage programs.

• Structure funding mechanisms — including grants, PRIs, and alternative models (e.g., AMCs) — in ways that align incentives with desired program outcomes. Collaborate with finance and legal teams to architect durable, mission-aligned instruments.

• Support program launch and staffing: Partner with operations to spin up new programs, design initial teams, and recruit interdisciplinary talent suited to complex, high-variance initiatives.

• Maintain strategic continuity throughout a program’s lifecycle. Surface operational lessons to inform future designs and iterate on incentives and metrics as programs evolve.

This is a role for a senior generalist with diverse technical and leadership skills:

• A high degree of scientific literacy; able to quickly understand new fields and communicate with domain experts.

• Hands-on attitude. Building philanthropic programs won’t be limited to drafting documents — it may also require traveling to regions such as low-income countries to understand local customs, bottlenecks, and sources of challenges.

• A seasoned technologist, capable of intuiting a technology’s capabilities and limitations, and able to interface directly with OAI’s product, research, and engineering functions as needed.

• Profound curiosity and a deep understanding of how the world is wired. Able to reason creatively about disruptions to existing systems brought about by the introduction of AI.

• Deep understanding of financial markets, how financial incentives are engineered, and how incentives influence behavior in real-world systems.

• Experience building interdisciplinary teams fit for purpose around first-of-its-kind initiatives.

• Experience with the policy process; clear-eyed about the need to bring stakeholders along and equipped with a toolkit for doing so.

This role suits someone with strong analytical judgment, a bias toward clarity and action, and a deep commitment to aligning AI deployment with durable public benefit.

We’re looking for someone with:

Required:

• Strategic depth and executional rigor: Numerous years of experience in strategic roles spanning philanthropy, policy, finance, or technology. Demonstrated ability to translate ambitious visions into operationally grounded programs.

• Fluency across domains: Comfort working at the intersection of science, technology, economics, and policy. Able to interface credibly with AI researchers one moment and policymakers or community stakeholders the next.

• Exceptional analytical judgment: Comfortable navigating ambiguity, identifying leverage points in complex systems, and prioritizing under uncertainty.

• Track record of zero-to-one program design: Experience building new initiatives from the ground up, including defining success metrics, structuring teams, and aligning incentives.

• Financial acumen: Deep familiarity with how incentives shape behavior across philanthropic and market-based systems. Comfortable working with funding models such as grants, PRIs, AMCs, or catalytic capital.

• Team builder and collaborator: Experience staffing interdisciplinary teams and building coalitions across diverse actors — from internal operational staff to external domain experts and mission-aligned partners.

• Mission orientation: A demonstrated commitment to public interest, with a desire to ensure that frontier AI is deployed in ways that serve humanity.

Preferred:

• Deep familiarity with one or more of: development economics, global health, governance systems, education reform, climate resilience, or infrastructure transformation.

• Experience working in or with mission-driven technical organizations, or philanthropic organizations tackling highly technical domains.

• Experience communicating across cultural and institutional boundaries — including with Global South partners and communities.

• Familiarity with the regulatory and geopolitical dynamics of emerging technologies, especially in the context of AI.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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