Senior Technical Recruiter

About the Team

OpenAI’s Recruiting team helps bring together the people who advance our mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. We partner closely with leaders across the company to identify exceptional talent, build thoughtful hiring processes, and deliver an outstanding candidate experience.

This role supports Applied Foundations, partnering with engineering leaders to hire the managers and senior leaders who will help build and scale OpenAI’s foundational engineering capabilities.

About the Role

We’re looking for an experienced technical recruiter with a strong track record of hiring engineering leaders. You’ll own leadership searches from initial role definition and talent mapping through assessment, offer negotiation, and close.

You’ll serve as a trusted advisor to senior engineering leaders, helping clarify what each role requires, understand the talent market, and make thoughtful hiring decisions. You’ll bring the judgment to navigate ambiguous searches, the credibility to engage accomplished engineering leaders, and the persistence to build relationships well before someone is ready to make a move.

Experience in executive search or an in-house leadership recruiting function is particularly valuable. You should be equally comfortable shaping a search strategy and personally doing the work to deliver a successful hire.

In this role, you will:

• Lead full-cycle searches for senior engineering leaders across Applied Foundations.

• Partner with hiring leaders to define role scope, leadership expectations, technical requirements, and the outcomes a successful hire will deliver.

• Develop talent maps and targeted search strategies, combining direct sourcing, referrals, market research, and long-term relationship building.

• Engage passive leadership candidates through thoughtful outreach and substantive conversations about their experience, motivations, and potential impact at OpenAI.

• Partner with hiring teams to assess leadership capabilities, including building teams, developing managers, setting technical direction, and leading through change.

• Advise senior stakeholders using market intelligence and search evidence, including when to revisit requirements, broaden a talent pool, or adjust the hiring approach.

• Own complex closing strategies, partnering with hiring leaders and compensation colleagues to navigate competing opportunities, equity considerations, counteroffers, and career decisions.

• Maintain a rigorous operating rhythm across searches, communicating progress, surfacing risks early, and delivering a consistent, thoughtful candidate experience.

• Strengthen leadership recruiting practices by sharing insights, improving assessment approaches, and helping teammates navigate challenging searches.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring substantial technical recruiting experience, with a demonstrated track record of personally owning and closing engineering leadership searches.

• Have experience in executive search, in-house leadership recruiting, or a comparable environment requiring targeted research, senior stakeholder partnership, and discretion.

• Can evaluate leadership scope beyond titles and partner with hiring managers to distinguish technical expertise, people leadership, and organizational impact.

• Build credibility with senior engineering leaders and offer clear recommendations, including constructive pushback when needed.

• Have successfully managed complex offers and understand how compensation, role scope, organizational context, and personal motivations influence a leadership candidate’s decision.

• Combine strategic judgment with strong sourcing and execution skills, taking ownership from search kickoff through close.

• Learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly and adapt effectively as priorities or role requirements evolve.

• Communicate clearly, handle sensitive information thoughtfully, and approach feedba...