Compensation Operations Analyst
About the Team
OpenAI’s People team supports a complex, rapidly growing organization of researchers, engineers, and business teams. The Compensation function ensures accuracy, scalability, and operational excellence across all compensation tools, systems, and data flows.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Compensation Operations Analyst to build and run the systems, tools, and processes that power compensation at OpenAI. This role is deeply operational and technical: you will configure HRIS modules, manage compensation tools end-to-end, maintain pristine data quality, and ensure compensation cycles run flawlessly. You’ll partner closely with People Systems, Total Rewards, Finance, and vendors to keep our compensation infrastructure accurate, scalable, and audit-ready.
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 configuration and day-to-day operations of compensation tools and HRIS compensation modules.
- Manage annual and off-cycle compensation processes, ensuring data integrity, testing, quality assurance, and on-time execution.
- Build and maintain compensation datasets, dashboards, audits, and data flows across systems.
- Lead compensation vendor relationships, including implementation, troubleshooting, and data submissions.
- Diagnose and resolve system issues, identify root causes, and drive process and tooling improvements.
- Partner with People Systems and Engineering to enhance architecture, workflows, and automation.
- Ensure high data accuracy across compensation systems and proactively identify gaps, risks, or anomalies.
- Translate technical or complex compensation system issues into clear guidance for stakeholders.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have 5+ years of experience in compensation operations, HRIS systems, or total rewards tooling in high-growth or technology environments.
- Have strong HRIS configuration experience, especially with compensation planning modules; Workday experience is preferred.
- Have advanced Excel skills and familiarity with BI tools such as Tableau or Looker; SQL or Python experience is a plus.
- Bring rigor and precision to data auditing, validation, and lifecycle management.
- Can manage and optimize tools at scale while navigating fast-moving environments.
- Communicate effectively across functions and are comfortable working with technical partners.
- Are action-oriented, organized, and reliable under tight deadlines.
- Have a strong ownership mindset and a bias toward simple, scalable systems.