Executive Compensation Lead
About the Team
OpenAI’s Equity Programs team designs and governs equity frameworks that align our people with the long-term success of safely building and deploying universally beneficial artificial general intelligence. The team ensures equity programs are well-structured, scalable, and grounded in strong governance as OpenAI grows.
By partnering closely with Finance, Legal, and People leaders, the Equity Programs team designs competitive equity offerings while maintaining disciplined stewardship of the equity pool, enabling OpenAI to attract, retain, and motivate exceptional talent in support of our mission.
About the Role
We’re hiring an Executive Compensation Lead to help shape how OpenAI compensates its most senior leaders. This is a high-impact individual contributor role focused on executive pay strategy, equity design, and governance in a fast-growing, high-visibility environment.
In this role, you will partner closely with senior leadership, Finance, Legal, and the Compensation Committee to design and evaluate executive compensation frameworks, assess equity usage and dilution, and support critical compensation decisions. You will own executive compensation analysis end to end, including benchmarking, modeling, and preparing clear, board-ready materials that inform leadership and committee decisions.
This role is ideal for someone with strong executive compensation expertise, sound judgment, and the ability to translate complex pay and governance considerations into practical, decision-ready recommendations. This role reports to our Head of Equity Programs
Your Responsibilities:
Design, evolve, and govern executive compensation and equity programs, including base salary, annual incentives, and long-term equity, aligned to business strategy, market benchmarks, and long-term value creation.
Lead executive compensation benchmarking and market analysis, including peer group construction, pay positioning, and evaluation of emerging practices across late-stage private and public technology companies.
Develop and maintain sophisticated models to assess executive pay outcomes, equity grant sizing, dilution, burn rate, and stock-based compensation expense under multiple scenarios.
Partner closely with Legal and Finance to ensure executive compensation programs align with disclosure, governance, and compliance requirements.
Prepare clear, decision-ready materials for senior leadership and the Compensation Committee, including executive pay proposals, equity usage analyses, and compensation review recommendations.
Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders by translating complex compensation, equity, and governance tradeoffs into concise, actionable insights.
Collaborate cross-functionally with Total Rewards, HRBPs, Recruiting, and Equity Administration to ensure accurate execution, implementation, and ongoing oversight of executive compensation programs.
We’re Seeking
8+ years of experience in executive and equity compensation, ideally within high-growth or late-stage technology companies.
Direct experience supporting executive compensation decisions and/or Compensation Committee processes.
Strong financial modeling and analytical skills, with the ability to assess tradeoffs across pay, dilution, governance, and retention.
Familiarity with executive compensation practices, including benchmarking, disclosure considerations, and governance standards.
Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills; experience with compensation survey tools and analytics platforms is a plus.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with comfort producing board-level and executive-ready materials.
High integrity, sound judgment, and discretion when handling sensitive executive information.
Workplace & Location
This role is based in our San Francisco office and we aren’t considering remote applications at this time. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office with optional work from home on Thursdays and Fridays. We also offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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, outdoor space for working and socializing, wellness 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; 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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