People Research Scientist

About this role

About the Team

OpenAI’s People team hires, engages, and retains world-class talent to safely build and deploy AGI that benefits all of humanity. The People Analytics team helps leaders make better, evidence-based talent decisions.

About the Role

As a People Research Scientist, you will bring deep expertise in research design, measurement, experimentation, and applied data science to OpenAI’s most important People programs. You will design studies, evaluate people processes, and help leaders better empower employees, strengthen organizational systems, and deliver exceptional employee experiences.

This is a high-ownership individual contributor role combining hands-on research, methodological leadership, and scalable people science capabilities. We’re looking for an experienced researcher who can turn ambiguous People questions into rigorous designs, validated insights, and actionable recommendations.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA or Mountain View, CA, with occasional travel to our San Francisco office.

What You’ll Do:

• Design rigorous research and evaluation strategies for recruiting, organizational health, manager effectiveness, employee experience, and talent outcomes.

• Apply advanced statistical modeling, machine learning, and research methods to inform program design, evaluate effectiveness, and quantify business impact.

• Partner with People Operations, data engineering, and people systems teams to define data requirements, improve data quality, establish documentation standards, and ensure research datasets are governed, reproducible, and privacy-preserving.

• Build scalable people science infrastructure, including self-service agentic tools, automated validation workflows, reusable research datasets and analytical pipelines.

• Develop research playbooks that establish rigorous standards for study design, measurement, validation, and documentation, enabling high-quality, repeatable, and scalable research across the organization.