Senior Workplace Business Partner

About the Team The Real Estate & Workplace (REW) team at OpenAI designs and manages the spaces, programs, and services that help employees do their best work and advance our mission. The team spans leasing, global operations, analytics, construction, workplace experience, employee services, and workplace programs. We support OpenAI’s mission by building flexible, scalable, cost-effective, and people-centered workplace solutions with strong operational discipline. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Workplace Business Partner to lead cross-functional workplace programs that improve the employee experience and strengthen how teams operate across our San Francisco office. This role is highly collaborative and requires someone who can move fluidly between strategic planning and hands-on execution in a fast-changing environment. You will partner across REW and with teams including Workplace Experience, Leasing, Global Food Programs, Executive Business Partners, Corporate Security, IT, Finance, People, and external vendors. You will serve as a trusted workplace partner for one or more organizations, translating business needs into scalable programs, clear operating rhythms, and practical solutions. This role reports to the AMERs Sr. Workplace Manager within Workplace Operations and is based in San Francisco, CA, with the requirement of being in the office 5 days per week. Relocation assistance is available for new hires. In this role, you will: - Own large-scale workplace programs end-to-end, from identifying needs and defining scope through execution, measurement, and iteration. - Partner with leaders and cross-functional stakeholders to understand team needs, prioritize tradeoffs, and align workplace priorities with company and organizational goals. - Build scalable systems, processes, and documentation that improve clarity, consistency, and quality of execution across recurring workplace needs. - Navigate ambiguous or fast-moving situations with sound judgment, identifying root problems and driving practical solutions rather than only addressing immediate requests. - Serve as a trusted point of contact for workplace-related updates, questions, and escalations, communicating clearly and proactively with employees and stakeholders. - Manage complex stakeholder and vendor relationships, driving alignment and accountability without relying on formal authority. - Design and launch initiatives that strengthen employee connection, culture, and workplace experience across teams. - Mentor peers or more junior team members by sharing context, raising execution quality, and helping others build strong workplace delivery practices. You might thrive in this role if you have: - Experience leading cross-functional workplace, employee experience, facilities, operations, or similar programs in a dynamic environment. - Strong judgment and ownership, with the ability to independently prioritize, make tradeoffs, and know when to seek input on complex decisions. - A systems mindset, with a track record of creating processes, tools, or operating rhythms that solve recurring problems and scale beyond one-off execution. - Excellent stakeholder management skills and the ability to build trust with employees, leaders, vendors, and cross-functional partners. - Clear, proactive communication skills, especially when translating operational complexity into simple guidance for different audiences. - Comfort balancing strategic work with hands-on execution, including a “no problem too small” approach when the moment requires it. - Curiosity about the full REW ecosystem and flexibility to stretch across functions as business and employee needs evolve. 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 uninco