Senior Employee Relations Partner

About the Team OpenAI’s People team is committed to hiring, engaging, and supporting world-class talent to help safely build and deploy universally beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The Global Employee Relations and People Standards team brings together expertise in employee relations, employment investigations, and People compliance, policy, and standards. We play a critical role in shaping how OpenAI supports its people through complexity, growth, and change. Our team guides and supports the company through some of its most nuanced and high-impact people challenges. We operate with deep context and care, balancing trust, judgment, and creativity in every situation. We don’t default to predefined frameworks. Instead, we take a principled yet flexible approach, designing thoughtful, tailored solutions that reflect our values, the needs of our employees, and the unique pace of OpenAI. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. About the Role We’re looking for a Senior Employee Relations Partner to focus on the non-investigative side of ER work, supporting high-trust, high-impact people matters. This includes conflict resolution, high-risk performance management, sensitive employee exits, and navigating workplace dynamics that require thoughtful, strategic support even when they don’t involve formal investigations. This role will report to the senior manager of the team. We're looking for someone who brings creativity, flexibility, and a deeply human-centered approach to solving people challenges. You’re energized by complexity and nuance, and instinctively seek out tailored, thoughtful solutions rather than one-size-fits-all answers. You don’t just apply rules; you understand context, think strategically, and help leaders make principled decisions that reflect our values and evolving culture. This role is a fit for someone who adapts quickly, thrives in uncertainty, and focuses on what’s possible, not just what’s standard. This work requires exceptional interpersonal skills and the ability to connect across all levels, build trust quickly, and guide leaders with clarity and confidence. You should be comfortable in a high-growth, fast-changing environment, making sound decisions with imperfect information. You bring expertise in navigating high-tension, highly escalated employee situations, and remain calm, clear-headed, and grounded under pressure. You’ll approach your work with urgency, empathy, and strong judgment, serving as a collaborative partner and steady presence in nuanced people moments. Your impact will help reinforce a culture of clarity, accountability, and psychological safety, and support leaders and teams in doing their best work through times of growth and complexity. This role will report to the senior manager of the team and will collaborate closely with cross-functional partners across the People Team. In this role, you will: • Advise and guide managers, HRBPs, and cross-functional partners through complex or high-risk employee situations, including performance management, conflict resolution, reorganizations, and difficult conversations. You’ll bring emotional intelligence and principled thinking to every interaction. • Help shape the responsible adoption of AI-enabled tools within ER, identifying opportunities to improve workflows, knowledge sharing, and service delivery while maintaining confidentiality, appropriate safeguards, and meaningful human review. • Help build scalable tools and frameworks that strengthen ER support across the company and reduce over-reliance on formal processes or investigations. • Translate recurring ER challenges into scalable tools, guidance, operating practices, and manager resources without creating unnecessary process or bureaucracy. • Act as a sounding board and escalation partner for workplace culture concerns, manager-employee dynamics, and early signals of broader people issues. • Collaborate cross-functionally with HRBPs, Legal, cross-functional partners, and leadership to ensure alignment on people decisions, organizational changes, and policy implementation. • Navigate ambiguity with a proactive, calm, creative, and solutions-oriented mindset, helping to clarify issues and move toward resolution in a dynamic, evolving environment. • Use data and insight to identify trends and advise on systemic solutions that promote trust, engagement, and long-term cultural health. You may thrive in this role if you have: • A Bachelor’s degree with 10+ years of experience in employee relations or other People roles, ideally in high-growth, fast-paced, and highly dynamic environments. Experience in tech, research, or mission-driven orgs is a plus. • A non-conventional mindset. You bring creative, outside-the-box thinking to complex people issues, and you’re not bound by the way things have always been done. You know when structure helps, and when a bespoke approach is the better path. • Proven experience managing high-tension, highly escalated employee situations with discretion, empathy, and calm under pressure. You know how to de-escalate effectively, build trust in difficult moments, and support people through emotionally charged or high-stakes scenarios. • A proven track record of handling complex matters with a steady, thoughtful, and pragmatic approach. • Exceptional interpersonal and relationship-building skills—you build trust quickly, communicate with warmth and clarity, and can connect with employees, managers, and senior leaders alike. • Demonstrated ability to design and implement scalable solutions—not only manage individual cases—including frameworks, tools, operating practices, or programs that improved how an organization handled recurring people challenges. • Experience and passion adopting or championing new technology, including AI-enabled tools, to improve team workflows. You approach AI adoption thoughtfully, with attention to confidentiality, accuracy, safeguards, and human judgment. • Strong executive presence and the ability to earn credibility with senior leaders and executives. You communicate a clear point of view, support it with sound reasoning, and remain open and adaptable when challenged. • A track record of operating effectively when policy, precedent, ownership, or the path forward is unclear. You can create structure from ambiguity and make progress without waiting for perfect information. • A low-ego, high-ownership mindset. You’re equally comfortable advising executives and rolling up your sleeves to fine-tune a template, fix a process, or support an employee through a difficult moment. • Strong instincts for people and culture, with the ability to read situations, understand organizational dynamics, and offer grounded, empathetic guidance. • Excellent verbal and written communication skills, especially when navigating sensitive or high-stakes conversations. • Comfort operating in ambiguity and rapid change, with the ability to move quickly and decisively while staying aligned with OpenAI’s mission and values. • A commitment to fairness, discretion, and principled decision-making. You’re thoughtful, balanced, and clear-eyed, even under pressure. 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. 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