Employer Brand Manager

About the Team

OpenAI is a frontier AI research and deployment company. Frontier research is at the center of how we advance our mission, with researchers, engineers, product leaders, operators, and many other teams working together to turn new capabilities into systems that benefit humanity. The People team helps OpenAI attract, engage, and support the exceptional talent this work requires.

Employer Brand sits at the intersection of Research, Recruiting, Communications, Marketing, and Brand. Its mandate is to continue to establish OpenAI in the talent market as the unique and leading frontier research lab—not simply another technology company—and make our distinctive research environment, mission, culture, and opportunity for impact relevant and tangible to every priority talent audience.

About the Role

We’re hiring an Employer Brand Manager to build and scale the strategy, narrative, and operating system that shape how priority talent understands OpenAI. This senior individual contributor will anchor our employer brand in OpenAI’s identity as a frontier research lab and translate an evidence-backed “why OpenAI / why now” narrative into campaigns, researcher and employee stories, recruiter and hiring manager enablement, and candidate experiences.

This role is especially important as OpenAI competes for exceptional talent across research, engineering, product, and other mission-critical functions in a fast-moving field where external perceptions can be incomplete or change quickly. You will develop a clear, credible talent narrative for priority audiences—anchored in frontier research and substantiated by individual agency, world-class infrastructure, research-to-product translation, deployment scale, and a willingness to answer hard questions candidly. This role is responsible for ensuring the external brand resembles our culture and ethos internally, therefore must remain immersed in various OpenAI research and applied branches.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; or Remote in the US.

In this role, you will:

- Lead OpenAI’s employer brand strategy for the full range of talent we need, anchored in our identity as a frontier research lab.

- Build a distinctive “why OpenAI / why now” narrative translating our culture, technical ambition, and impact into credible stories.

- Use candidate, employee, recruiter, and market insights to sharpen audience priorities, positioning, content, and the candidate experience.

- Create and lead a scalable content and enablement system—from the careers site and employee stories to job descriptions, outreach, events, closing materials, and guidance for recruiters and leaders.

- Ensure the external brand promise holds throughout the candidate journey, from first impression through onboarding.

- Measure brand perception, audience engagement, candidate understanding and experience, and recruiting impact.

- Build an AI-native operating model across Recruiting, Communications, Marketing, Brand, Recruiting Operations, Legal, and external partners—with clear decision rights, quality standards, and human judgment.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have 7+ years of experience in employer branding, talent marketing, research communications, recruitment marketing, brand strategy, or a closely related field.

- Have experience across both high-growth startups and larger, more established organizations, with the ability to move quickly while building programs that scale.

- Possess high agency, strong judgement, bias toward action, and a willingness to figure things out without leaning on a playbook.

- Have built an employer brand capability from the ground up and can translate a strategy into durable systems, content, and operating practices.

- Can build trust with technical leaders, ask technically informed questions, and preserve nuance while making the work accessible.

- Are an exceptional writer and editor who can translate fast-moving technical work into accurate, credible, and compelling narratives without oversimplifying it.

- Use research and data to define audiences, identify perception gaps, prioritize investments, and measure recruiting impact.

- Have a track record of influencing senior technical stakeholders.

- Exercise sound judgment in high-stakes, high-scrutiny environments where narrative accuracy, approvals, and discretion matter.

- Have experience leading external agencies or creative partners from brief through delivery.

- Operate with an AI-native mindset: actively experiment with and use AI tools to elevate the creativity, quality, and scale of your work, while applying strong judgment about where human perspective and accountability remain essential.