Global Program Lead, New Graduate – SMB Fellowship

ABOUT THE TEAM The Community team builds relationships with credible power users, helps them do something consequential with OpenAI’s technology, and turns the strongest outcomes into stories people remember and retell. ABOUT THE ROLE OpenAI is seeking a founding Program Lead to build a fellowship connecting exceptional new graduates with small and medium-sized businesses seeking practical support adopting AI. Small businesses need hands-on help adopting AI. New graduates need credible pathways into the AI economy. We are looking for someone who can create concrete value—and find inspiring stories that cut through the noise—by connecting the two. This new program will recruit and train technically capable graduates, match them with businesses, and support them in deploying OpenAI tools against real operational needs. Its goals are to help these businesses achieve measurable value, create meaningful career pathways in AI deployment for new grad, and surface credible stories about how AI can benefit everyday organizations and communities. You will take the program from concept to launch—testing demand, shaping the service model, recruiting the founding team and first fellows, and building the systems required to operate responsibly and scale. This is a zero-to-one leadership role for someone who combines entrepreneurial judgment with strong field and operational experience. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Drive the strategy and build the team and partners to realize, then scale, this program. - Identify the businesses, markets, and operational needs best suited to the program. Build a strong pipeline of SMB partners and establish clear readiness criteria. - Develop a repeatable methodology for understanding business needs, deploying OpenAI tools, and enabling teams to use them independently. - Design the full fellow experience, from selection and training through deployment support and career development. - Establish standards for responsible deployment, including privacy, security, system access, quality, and escalation. - Define meaningful measures of business impact, product adoption, and fellow development. - Build feedback loops that turn early deployments into a scalable operating model. - Partner across OpenAI—including Product, GTM, Research, Global Affairs, Legal, Security, Communications, and Marketing. - Pinpoint and work with our creative teams to capture authentic, consent-based stories grounded in strong participant outcomes. - Develop a thoughtful path toward additional markets and a broader profession of AI deployment specialists. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU - Have built a new program, business, service, community, or field operation from the ground up. - Bring practical fluency with AI tools and understand how to apply them to real business problems. - Have firsthand experience working with small businesses and earning the trust of owners, operators, and employees. - Can translate early customer insight into a focused service and repeatable operating model. - Have recruited and developed exceptional early-career talent. - Have led multidisciplinary teams and managed agencies, vendors, or other external partners. - Work effectively across functions and build alignment without relying on formal authority. - Are comfortable operating in ambiguity, learning quickly, and adapting based on evidence. - Exercise sound judgment around safety, privacy, consent, and responsible technology deployment. - Communicate clearly with executives, partners, participants, and business owners. - Are willing to travel regularly and be closely involved in early deployments. The ideal candidate brings together the instincts of an entrepreneur, field operator, educator, and community builder. Your specific background matters less than your ability to understand what customers genuinely need, deliver practical value, develop talented people, and turn early lessons into a model others can reproduce. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. To notify OpenAI that