Legal Program Manager

About the Team OpenAI’s Legal team helps advance our mission by tackling novel legal issues in AI. Our team brings together professionals across technology, privacy, intellectual property, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation. Our regulatory compliance work turns legal requirements into practical programs that support responsible AI development and deployment. About the Role As a Legal Program Manager, you will independently manage assigned programs and workstreams across Legal priorities, with a focus on emerging user risk. Your portfolio may include sensitive user escalations, intake and response workflows, and improvements informed by recurring issues, with the mix evolving alongside team needs. You will partner with counsel, senior legal program managers, and technical and business teams to establish priorities and scope, then drive day-to-day execution. You’ll organize information, coordinate partners, and move open questions toward decisions. As you develop expertise, you’ll take on more ambiguous projects and build repeatable processes that help teams work more effectively. This full-time role is based in San Francisco, CA, or New York, NY. 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: - Independently manage assigned legal programs and workstreams: define plans, owners, milestones, and dependencies within agreed scope, anticipate blockers, and drive execution. - Translate counsel’s and specialist teams’ guidance into repeatable workflows, playbooks, and documentation. Depending on your portfolio, this may include intake, sensitive user escalations, information gathering, and response coordination. - Build strong partnerships across Legal, Product, Safety, User Operations, Policy, and other teams to clarify ownership, coordinate handoffs, and drive commitments through completion. - Clarify open questions, gather and verify information, synthesize partner input, and bring recommendations and tradeoffs to the appropriate decision-makers. Escalate decisions that require changes to priorities, scope, or resources. - Maintain a reliable source of truth for matters, source documents, owners, deadlines, decisions, and actions. Provide concise reporting on progress, blockers, and decisions needed. - Identify recurring issues and execution gaps, propose practical improvements, and lead agreed changes through implementation and adoption. Use tools and automation thoughtfully, verify outputs, and assess improvements in quality, timeliness, and partner effort. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have demonstrated experience independently managing programs or projects from planning through delivery in legal operations, business operations, compliance, policy, investigations, or a related field. - Have experience coordinating work across teams, maintaining reliable records, and driving open questions and actions to resolution. Experience working with an in-house legal team or in a technology environment is a plus. - Have improved a recurring workflow, documented the change, and helped others adopt it. You can explain what improved and how you assessed the result. - Take ownership of execution, set and achieve milestones, anticipate dependencies, and follow through without frequent direction. - Bring strong organizational, analytical, and communication skills. Exercise sound judgment under pressure, adapt to changing priorities, and know when to proceed independently or seek guidance. - Handle sensitive information and difficult subject matter with discretion and care, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and recognize when counsel or specialist input is needed. - Are resourceful and han