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Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Onsite
About the Team
OpenAI for Government works with U.S. and allied government institutions to support the responsible adoption of AI across defense, intelligence, federal civilian, state and local, and international public-sector missions. We help public servants use frontier AI in ways that are effective, trusted, and grounded in real-world requirements for safety, reliability, security, compliance, and accountability.
Government Trusted Access programs help eligible public-sector organizations and practitioners use advanced capabilities for approved, high-value work in sensitive domains. These programs bring together OpenAI for Government, Product Policy, Legal, Security, International, Research, User Operations, Technical Success, Global Affairs, and domain experts. Each program has distinct eligibility criteria, safeguards, and decision owners; our job is to make the overall government experience coherent and executable.
About the Role
We are seeking a Program Manager to coordinate OpenAI’s Government Trusted Access portfolio across high-trust domains, such as cyber and bio. You will build and run the operating mechanisms that move government participants from initial interest through review, onboarding, activation, ongoing support, and program improvement.
The right person is a highly organized, low-ego operator who can move between strategy and detail. You are comfortable working across technical, policy, legal, safety, security, customer, and operational teams; you build durable systems without adding unnecessary process; and you communicate clearly when facts, ownership, or requirements are still evolving.
This role is based in Washington, DC. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Coordinate government participation across domain-specific Trusted Access programs, including cyber and biology, while helping stand up future programs as the portfolio evolves.
Own the end-to-end program operating rhythm across intake, qualification, review, approval, onboarding, activation, ongoing support, renewal, and offboarding.
Maintain a clear portfolio view of applicants and participating organizations, access levels, requirements, owners, dependencies, commitments, risks, and decisions needed.
Build practical program mechanisms such as roadmaps, ownership maps, decision logs, risk registers, service standards, operating reviews, dashboards, and executive updates.
Coordinate cross-functional reviews across OpenAI for Government, Safety, Product Policy, Legal, Security, Product, Research, User Operations, Technical Success, Global Affairs, and domain experts.
Preserve clear decision boundaries: ensure the right domain owner makes eligibility, policy, safety, security, and access decisions while keeping the broader process moving.
Identify stalled reviews, broken handoffs, unclear ownership, capacity constraints, and recurring operational gaps; bring the right context, options, and recommendation to resolve them.
Partner with government-facing teams to set accurate expectations, coordinate participant communications, and ensure commitments are tracked through completion.
Define and monitor program health through measures such as review time, backlog age, onboarding completion, activation, support demand, participant outcomes, and operational risk.
Turn manual and one-off work into scalable workflows, documentation, training, automation, and tooling while retaining appropriate human judgment for sensitive decisions.
Capture lessons across domains and translate them into reusable operating patterns without flattening meaningful differences between programs.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Hold an active TS clearance
Have 5–10 years of experience in program management, strategy and operations, product operations, trust and safety, risk operations, support operations, government technology, implementation, or a related field.
Have led complex, cross-functional programs from an ambiguous problem statement through launch and steady-state operation.
Can build trust and drive alignment without direct authority while keeping ownership, accountability, and escalation paths clear.
Can translate technical, policy, legal, safety, security, and customer requirements into practical workflows and decision structures.
Are analytically fluent and comfortable using operational data, dashboards, case-management systems, and lightweight automation to identify bottlenecks and improve program health.
Communicate clearly and directly with technical teams, operators, government stakeholders, and executives, especially when evidence is incomplete or tradeoffs are sensitive.
Learn unfamiliar domains quickly, ask strong questions, and know when to bring in specialists rather than overstate your own expertise.
Operate calmly in a fast-moving environment, exercise sound judgment with sensitive information, and follow through reliably on details and commitments.
Experience supporting government, public-sector, national-security, regulated, or other security-conscious organizations.
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.
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