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.

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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.