Level

OpenAI

Technical Program Manager, Model Deployment & Capacity

OpenAI is hiring a Technical Program Manager, Model Deployment & Capacity in San Francisco, United States. It pays $257k-$445k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Level rates this role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include AI research, technical program management and capacity planning.
  • Level classifies it as a senior role.
  • Level lists 793 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

Manage cross-functional programs connecting product demand and capacity forecasting to safe, scalable AI model deployments.

ai-researchtechnical-program-managementcapacity-planningmodel-deploymentcross-functional-leadershipinference-scaling

About the Team

The Product & Platform teams at OpenAI are responsible for delivering the company’s most impactful offerings—such as ChatGPT, our API platform, and new enterprise capabilities—to a global and diverse customer base. These systems must perform at scale and deliver exceptional experiences to developers, consumers, and businesses alike.

The ChatGPT infrastructure team is responsible for ensuring that our products can serve rapidly growing demand with the performance, reliability, and quality our users expect.

This work sits at the intersection of product demand, model deployment, inference, research, fleet, and capacity. The team translates changing product and model needs into clear capacity decisions and safe, scalable launches.

 

About the Role

We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to lead the operating system for Chat capacity and model deployment. You will connect demand forecasting and capacity allocation with model readiness, rollout planning, launch coordination, and post-deployment learning. You will also own mode deployment beyond capacity by working with cross functional teams across research, post-training, inference and product to own mainline model deployment.

You will bring structure to constrained-capacity decisions, improve the tooling and mechanisms teams use to prioritize demand, and help new models reach users safely and efficiently. Success requires technical depth, sound judgment under ambiguity, and crisp execution across product, research, infrastructure, and operations teams.

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:

  • Own cross-functional programs for Chat capacity forecasting, allocation, headroom planning, and constrained-capacity operations.

  • Build durable intake, prioritization, and decision mechanisms that connect product demand and model requirements to available serving capacity.

  • Partner with product, research, inference, fleet, and capacity teams to develop scenarios, surface tradeoffs, and drive timely allocation decisions.

  • Lead model deployment readiness and rollout planning, including serving-capacity allocation, launch sequencing, validation, and operational handoffs.

  • Establish clear readiness gates, risk reviews, rollback criteria, and escalation paths for model deployments.

  • Drive launch coordination through deployment and post-launch learning, turning recurring gaps and manual work into scalable tooling and operating practices.

  • Define and operationalize metrics for forecast accuracy, capacity utilization and headroom, deployment velocity, reliability, latency, quality, and user impact.

  • Create concise, decision-ready communications that make dependencies, risks, capacity constraints, and launch choices clear to technical and product leaders.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have led complex technical programs in infrastructure, distributed systems, capacity planning, model serving, or large-scale deployment environments.

  • Can reason credibly about demand, supply, headroom, reliability, latency, and quality tradeoffs, and translate them into executable plans.

  • Have built operating mechanisms or tooling that replaced fragmented, manual workflows with scalable systems and clear ownership.

  • Are effective in high-ambiguity, constrained environments where priorities change and decisions require explicit tradeoffs.

  • Build alignment across research, engineering, product, finance or capacity planning, and operations without relying on direct authority.

  • Use metrics to guide decisions, identify bottlenecks, and demonstrate measurable improvements in throughput, predictability, or reliability.

  • Communicate with precision and can move comfortably between technical detail, operational execution, and executive-level decisions.

  • Thrive in ambiguous, scaling environments and can bring order to complex cross-functional work without losing pace.

  • Care about OpenAI's mission and about expanding responsible access to advanced AI systems.

 

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.

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. 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.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.

How we rate this

Technical Program Manager, Model Deployment & Capacity at OpenAI rates 75 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchTechnical Program ManagementCapacity PlanningModel DeploymentCross Functional LeadershipInference Scaling

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Tell me about a project where technical program management was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where capacity planning was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where model deployment was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where cross functional leadership was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Technical Program Management, Capacity Planning, Model Deployment, and Cross Functional Leadership. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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