Data Scientist, People Innovation

About the Role

We’re hiring a Data Scientist to support People Innovation Labs, a fast-moving engineering team embedded in the People organization focused on rethinking how we find and retain the best talent and empower everyone to do their best work.

From recruiting to culture, we’re designing systems and products that give our People Team a significant edge by infusing OpenAI’s models and first-principles thinking into every aspect of our work. Our projects range from greenfield 0-1 products like OpenHouse (our internal knowledge hub) to AI-powered automations and scalable recruiting tools. We’re defining the future of work at OpenAI, creating a blueprint for how AI can supercharge productivity, culture, and innovation.

In this role, you’ll be embedded with Product and Engineering to ensure our work drives measurable business outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Define success metrics for agentic recruiting and HR systems, including leading indicators that enable weekly iteration.

• Design measurement and experimentation frameworks for always-on systems across every stage of the candidate and employee lifecycle — using holdouts, staged rollouts, and quasi-experimental methods when needed.

• Partner with PMs and engineers to instrument, evaluate, and monitor launches so every meaningful release has observability and a credible read on incremental value.

• Translate behavioral and model-driven signals into decisions: what to scale, where to intervene, and how to allocate human and compute attention across segments.

• Build repeatable decision loops (pre-launch criteria → post-launch read → next action) that convert analysis into shipped changes.

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years in a quantitative role (e.g., Data Science, Decision Science), ideally at a product-led company or in the internal people software space.

• Deep grounding in experimentation, causal inference, and applied statistics, with experience designing and interpreting tests in real-world, always-on environments.

• Strong technical fluency in SQL and Python, including working directly with messy, incomplete behavioral data to quantify impact.

• Proven track record of translating results into shipped decisions (product, lifecycle, targeting, routing).

• Strong business judgment and a bias toward action: able to scope ambiguous problems, define success, and move quickly from insight to strategy.

• Excellent communicator and partner to PMs/Engineers; comfortable influencing stakeholders and presenting recommendations to senior leadership.

• Interest in building company culture and/or recruiting the world’s most talented people.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with large language models and AI-assisted operations platforms.

• Experience working on operational automation and decision systems (routing, prioritization, optimization).

• Experience operating in early-stage or rapidly evolving environments, including building measurement and experimentation frameworks from scratch.

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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