Contingent Workforce Program Manager Jobs in California

About the Team
OpenAI Finance is responsible for ensuring the organization is set up for success in pursuit of its mission.
Within Finance, the Procurement team serves as a trusted advisor to the business, optimizing investments, securing essential resources, and enabling OpenAI's mission through efficient and effective procurement practices.
The Extended Workforce team helps OpenAI access specialized and flexible talent while creating a consistent, compliant, and high-quality experience for hiring managers, workers, vendors, and internal partners. As part of an AI-native organization, we are also rethinking how extended workforce programs should operate, using AI, automation, data, and new ways of working to reduce friction, improve decision-making, and build more scalable workforce solutions. Our goal is not simply to modernize traditional contingent workforce practices, but to help define what best-in-class extended workforce management looks like in an AI-first company.
About the Role
We're looking for an experienced, hands-on Extended Workforce Program Manager to operate and continuously improve key elements of OpenAI's extended workforce program.
Reporting to the Head of Extended Workforce, you will be a trusted partner responsible for translating program priorities into clear plans, scalable solutions, and measurable outcomes. This is an individual contributor role with significant cross-functional ownership and influence. You will take ownership of complex workstreams, solve ambiguous operational challenges, and partner closely with our Extended Workforce Operations team, Global Compliance Lead, and cross-functional stakeholders to strengthen the systems, workflows, and partnerships that enable the program to scale globally.
While operational excellence is at the heart of this role, we are equally excited about what comes next. We believe AI presents an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how extended workforce programs operate. We are looking for someone who enjoys challenging conventional thinking, experimenting with new ideas, and helping build a more intelligent, automated, and scalable operating model for the future.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days per week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In This Role, You Will:

• Partner with the Head of Extended Workforce to set direction for assigned workstreams, then own their end-to-end execution by translating priorities into clear plans, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Partner closely with the Extended Workforce Operations team and Global Compliance Lead to ensure program operations are efficient, scalable, and aligned with compliance requirements.
• Advise hiring managers and business stakeholders on workforce solutions, exercising sound judgment across stakeholder experience, speed, cost, compliance, risk, and operational scalability.
• Translate business needs, stakeholder feedback, and operational insights into improved workflows, automation, systems, reporting, and user experiences.
• Identify, test, and implement practical applications of AI, automation, analytics, and decision-support tools that reduce manual work, improve decisions, and enable a more scalable operating model.
• Identify root causes behind recurring operational challenges and build durable processes, systems, and frameworks that prevent them from recurring.
• Manage strategic supplier relationships to drive optimal performance, strengthen service delivery, address gaps, and ensure partners continue to meet OpenAI's evolving workforce needs.
• Establish program health measures and operational insights that identify systemic issues, inform priorities, and drive measurable improvements in service, efficiency, adoption, supplier performance, and risk.
• Lead the rollout and adoption of new processes and tools, coordinating testing, documentation, training, communications, and success measurement.
• Independently resolve complex workforce requests and escalations while balancing business needs, worker experience, cost, compliance, and risk.
• Raise the quality and consistency of execution across the program by developing reusable practices, decision frameworks, documentation, and tools that help the broader team operate more effectively.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

• Have 7+ years of progressive experience in extended workforce, contingent workforce, procurement operations, workforce operations, or a related field.
• Have substantial client-side experience building and operating an extended workforce program within a complex organization, including personally designing, implementing, and continuously improving its processes, systems, controls, and operating model. This is a core requirement.
• Have experience scaling workforce processes, systems, automation, reporting, and service delivery, including hands-on experience with VNDLY or a similar Vendor Management System.
• Are a strong operator who enjoys getting into the details, solving problems directly, and building solutions rather than relying on suppliers or external partners to do the heavy lifting.
• Combine strong judgment and strategic thinking with a willingness to remain deeply involved in execution, using operational data and workforce metrics to prioritize work and improve performance.
• Understand the legal, compliance, and operational considerations associated with extended workforce programs, including worker classification, co-employment, tenure, location, access, and data protection.
• Build trusted partnerships across Procurement, Finance, Legal, People, Security, Privacy, Enterprise Technology, suppliers, and business stakeholders.
• Bring deep knowledge of extended workforce engagement models and the operational considerations associated with each.
• Are curious, adaptable, and excited to grow your scope while helping the team rethink how extended workforce programs operate in an AI-first world.

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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