OpenAI careers start at openai.com/careers, and the full list of open roles is at openai.com/careers/search. Every Apply button on those pages sends you to the same role on OpenAI's job board hosted by Ashby, at jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai, which is where the application form lives. When we read that board on 17 October 2026 it held 814 open postings. The form is short, but it comes with a rule most applicants miss: you may apply no more than five times in any 180 days. This guide covers where the roles are, what the form asks, how the limit should shape your choices, how to tailor one application for one posting, and what OpenAI says happens next.
Where OpenAI posts jobs
OpenAI keeps two front doors to the same jobs:
- openai.com/careers/search is the search page on OpenAI's own site. Each role has a page at
openai.com/careers/<role-name>/. - jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai is the board on Ashby, the applicant tracking system OpenAI uses. On the careers page we checked, every "Apply now" link pointed to
jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/<posting id>/application.
You can start on either. The application you submit is the same one. If Ashby is new to you, our guide to AshbyHQ explains what the system is and why there is no Ashby account to create.
Ashby also publishes a public job posting API that any browser can open, and OpenAI's board is one of them. We read it on 17 October 2026 to get a picture of what OpenAI is hiring for.
| Measure | What the board showed on 17 October 2026 |
|---|---|
| Open postings | 814, of which 813 full time and 1 contract |
| Largest departments | Go To Market 147, Applied AI 118, Scaling 108, Research 63, User Operations 55, Marketing 44 |
| Main location | San Francisco 556, then Singapore 38, Tokyo 29, US Remote 23, Washington DC 23, New York City 22, London 22 |
| Workplace type | Hybrid 507, OnSite 29, Remote 22, not set 256 |
| Postings showing a pay range | 654 of 814 |
| Last published since 1 August 2026 | 505 of 814 |
Three things stand out for a job seeker.
Research is a minority of the openings. Go To Market, Applied AI, Scaling and User Operations together hold 428 postings, against 63 in Research. If you have assumed OpenAI only hires researchers, the board says otherwise.
Most roles sit in San Francisco on a hybrid schedule. More than 240 of the postings describe "a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week", and the US forms ask "Are you able to work from our US office three days per week?" Remote roles exist but are few.
Pay ranges are usually listed. The Technical Program Manager, Compute Infrastructure posting showed $257K to $335K plus equity, and Research Engineer, Codex showed $380K to $500K plus equity. Read the range before you apply, since the form will not ask your expectations but the recruiter may.
A note on dates: Ashby's documentation defines publishedAt as when a job was "last published", so a recent date can mean a reposted role, not a new one. Seventy-seven postings on the board had been published before 2026.
Early career and the Residency
OpenAI's Emerging Talent page describes internships, a research residency, and full-time roles in research, applied engineering and product designed for people with zero to three years of experience. When we read the board, none of the 814 titles was an internship or a residency, so these appear in waves.
The OpenAI Residency is a six-month, full-time paid program in San Francisco. Its FAQ says it is not an internship, residents cannot be enrolled in school at the same time, the salary is $18,333 a month, and residents who perform well get full-time offers at the end. On 17 October 2026 the page said "Applications for the 2026 Residency are now closed", and that spots open on a rolling basis.
How the Ashby application works
We read two OpenAI application forms on 17 October 2026, for Technical Program Manager, Compute Infrastructure and Research Engineer, Codex. They asked the same things in the same order:
- Autofill from resume. An optional upload at the top that fills key fields for you. Check every field it fills, because parsing is not perfect.
- Legal name, "exactly as shown on your government-issued ID", plus an optional preferred name.
- Email, resume and phone number.
- Where are you currently located? and When can you start a new role?
- Work authorization: whether you are authorized to work in the country where the job is located.
- Sponsorship: whether you will now or in the future require visa sponsorship, with the note that OpenAI "may provide immigration and sponsorship support to new employees based on their unique circumstances."
- Office: whether you can work from the US office three days a week.
- Additional Information, a free-text box for "your motivation to apply or additional context for your application."
- Acknowledgements: an Applicant Arbitration Agreement and a certification that your answers are true.
- Voluntary self-identification: gender, race and veteran status for US equal employment reporting. These are optional and the form says declining "will not subject you to any adverse treatment."
Two details deserve attention.
The certification is about you. It reads, in part: "I further certify that I, the undersigned applicant, have personally completed this application." The form also says OpenAI is "not seeking, nor should you disclose, any information that may be subject to confidentiality obligations to third parties, including but not limited to, your current employer." Keep both in mind when you describe your current work in the free-text box.
The yes or no questions are the filter. There is no cover letter field and no long screening questionnaire, so the resume, the three yes or no answers and the Additional Information box carry most of the weight. Answer the yes or no questions truthfully. Ashby gives employers tools to act on answers like these, as our what is an ATS guide explains, and a careless "no" to the office question is hard to undo.
Other OpenAI postings may add questions for a specific team. Read the whole form before you start filling it in.
Application limits
Above the first field, both forms showed a box titled "This job has application limits":
Please Note: we have set up limits for applications across roles. Candidates may not apply more than 5 times in any 180 day span.
That is a feature of Ashby. Its Application Limits documentation lets an employer "limit the number of times a candidate can apply to any job within a scope over a certain number of days", and also block rejected candidates from reapplying to the same role, or to any role, for a set period. The employer picks the numbers and writes the message. OpenAI's numbers are five applications per 180 days, across roles.
Put that against 814 open postings and the arithmetic is plain: you can apply to at most five of them in a six-month window. Some practical consequences:
- Choose before you click. Read every posting in your area first, then rank them. Apply to the two or three you are strongest for, and keep the rest of your allowance for roles that open later.
- Similar titles are separate applications. OpenAI often posts the same title for several teams. Each one you apply to counts.
- Count your applications yourself. Ashby documents no candidate portal that shows your history, so keep a note of each role and date. Our AshbyHQ guide covers what you see when a limit blocks you.
- Reapplying has a cost. If you were rejected for a role, a second try at a close variant uses another of your five.
Tailoring for one posting
With five applications in six months, each one should be written for its posting. OpenAI's postings follow a consistent shape that makes this easier. Every posting on the board included an "About OpenAI" section, and roughly three in four also used the headings "In this role, you will" and "You might thrive in this role if you". The first list is the work. The second is what the hiring team will look for in your resume.
A practical way to work through one posting:
- Copy the "You might thrive" list into a document. For each line, write the one place on your resume that proves it. The TPM posting, for example, asks for "5+ years of experience in program management for major projects including capital projects or hyperscaler infrastructure deployment." If you have that, the resume should say it in a way a reader finds in seconds.
- Use the posting's words where they are true for you. If the posting says GPU clusters and your resume says compute capacity, and you did run GPU clusters, say so. Only list skills and tools you can discuss in an interview, because an OpenAI interviewer will ask.
- Lead with results. OpenAI's interview guide says the company is "not credential-driven" and is interested in people who "have demonstrated the ability to ramp up quickly in a new domain and produce results." Bullets that show what changed because of your work answer that directly.
- Write the Additional Information answer for this role. Two or three sentences on why this team, naming something specific the team has shipped or published. The guide recommends reading OpenAI's recent work, "especially those related to the team you are interviewing for."
- Read it back as the recruiter would. Check that dates, titles and employers are exactly right, since the form asks you to certify your answers.
Our guide to tailoring a resume covers this method in more depth, including how far to go in mirroring a posting's language.
After you apply
OpenAI's interview guide lays out the process, and says your experience "may differ" by team:
| Stage | What OpenAI says |
|---|---|
| Application and resume review | "It typically takes the recruiting team one week to review your résumé and email you back." |
| Introductory calls | A recruiting coordinator schedules a call with the hiring manager or recruiter if there is a potential fit |
| Skills-based assessment | Formats vary by team and "may include: pair coding interviews, take-home projects, technical tests"; you hear within a week whether you advanced |
| Final interviews | Virtual by default, with the option to interview in San Francisco; typically four to six hours with four to six people over one to two days |
| Decision | Within one week of the final interviews; the recruiter may ask for references |
On AI tools, the guide says expectations "vary by interview: some formats intentionally allow them, while others are designed to assess your independent problem-solving without AI tools", and that the preparation materials will say which. Ask your recruiter if it is unclear.
Ashby documents no candidate status page, so updates come by email. If a week passes with nothing, it is usually not a sign either way. The how to follow up on a job application post covers when a short note to a recruiter makes sense.
Where ApplyEze fits
ApplyEze makes an app that applies to jobs for you, and Ashby is one of the 12 platforms it completes end to end, alongside Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, JazzHR, BambooHR, Rippling, Pinpoint and Recruitee (Workday and Oracle need a connected application inbox). Our index held more than 100 OpenAI roles that apply through Ashby on 17 October 2026. For employers that cap applications, such as on Ashby, ApplyEze skips an employer once it has told you that you hit its limit. For OpenAI in particular, though, the five-in-180-days cap and the certification that you personally completed the application both point the same way: choose your roles carefully and fill in this form yourself.