People (HR) Operations Specialist

About the Team

The People Operations team at OpenAI is the engine that keeps our employee lifecycle running seamlessly, from a new hire’s first day to major organizational milestones. We partner across the company to deliver operational excellence in onboarding, employee mobility, M&A integrations, international expansion, audit/compliance, and beyond. Our work blends precision, adaptability, and innovation—whether we’re maintaining critical systems, optimizing processes, or building automations that scale with our rapid growth.

We thrive in complexity, moving quickly to solve problems and anticipate needs before they arise. We value clarity over complexity, collaboration over silos, and are relentless in our focus on creating a smooth, efficient, and world-class employee experience.

About the Role

We’re seeking a proactive and adaptable professional who thrives at the intersection of HR Operations, Systems, and Compliance. In this role, you’ll be a key driver of ensuring employee data integrity through a suite of people data audits that span across the entire employee lifecycle. These audits will focus on Workday worker profile creation, job changes, one-time payments, and terminations.

You’ll play a critical role supporting our diverse and fast-evolving needs related to ad-hoc reporting and establishing automated reconciliations against large data sets. You bring a sense of urgency, strong process mapping and operational design skills and effectively partner with engineering and systems teams to translate complex operational requirements into scalable, efficient workflows.

If you enjoy working in a dynamic environment where no two days are the same and where your work directly fuels company growth and operational excellence, this role is for you. This role reports to the HR Ops Lead.

In this role, you will:

• Maintain Workday data, and ensure that updates across the company are accurately reflected, including open positions, the creation of hire records, and internal mobility.

• Respond to inquiries from employees and cross functional partners to ensure a positive experience, with a commitment to accuracy, compliance, and efficiency.

• Support global employee onboarding, including the bespoke needs of executives and acquisitions while prioritizing timeliness and data accuracy.

• Partner closely with Program owners, Systems, Employment Legal, Compliance, Recruiting Ops, Payroll, Finance, HRBPs, IT, Workplace Operations, Corporate Security, and others.

• Collaborate across the spectrum of People processes to ensure a holistic, interconnected system that delivers excellence across the employee lifecycle.

• Continuously measure and act to elevate metrics relating to employees’ experience.

• Drive cross-functional collaboration with key stakeholders and partner teams, leveraging strong project management expertise to help lead large-scale, strategic workstreams and change management initiatives with significant operational impact.

• Act as a thought leader in leveraging AI and operational best practices to automate repetitive administrative work, improving efficiency and accuracy, while delivering a best-in-class employee experience.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 5+ years of experience working in an HR or People Operations role through company growth and scaling, a resourceful approach, and ability to thrive in ambiguity.

• Proficiency with Workday and advanced spreadsheet analysis (e.g. utilize apps scripts).

• The ability to deconstruct business processes to their core components and identify root causes for gaps or inefficiencies.

• Fantastic communication and interpersonal skills with the ability to explain complex concepts in a simple way.

• Passion for enabling employee lifecycle moments that delight and building processes that scale; particularly using AI solutions.

• Unwavering attention to detail, exceptional rigor, and a commitment to unparalleled excellence in your craft.

Workplace & Location

This role is based in our San Francisco or NYC office, and we are not considering remote applications at this time. We do encourage you to apply even if you prefer a fully remote role as location factors may change over time.

We offer relocation support to new employees, and we use a hybrid model: three days in the office per week with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays.

Our open-plan offices have height-adjustable desks, conference rooms, phone booths, well-stocked kitchens full of snacks and drinks, three in-house prepared meals daily, a private outdoor space for working in the sun or socializing, nap rooms, private bike storage, and more.

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; ret