Senior Paralegal, Employment

About the Team

OpenAI’s Legal team plays an indispensable role in advancing OpenAI's mission by navigating futuristic, foundational legal issues in AI. This is the team for you if you care deeply about doing meaningful and novel work with a team of technology lawyers. The team is composed of various backgrounds, including technology, venture capital, M&A, employment, and tax law.

We seek a Senior Employment Paralegal to join our team and provide paralegal and project management support and coordination across the employment legal team and its cross-functional partners including people and recruiting teams and employment litigation matters, as well as own, manage and build out / scale our paralegal support and function across multiple subject matter areas.

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.

In this role, you will:

• Serve as a strategic partner to Legal, People, Compliance, and business teams to design, implement, and scale employment-related tools, systems, and process improvements in a high-growth environment.

• Support and coordinate employment investigations, pre-litigation matters, employee agency matters, and litigation, in partnership with internal and outside counsel.

• Partner with outside counsel and internal stakeholders to support employment law compliance, risk mitigation strategies, and implementation of evolving regulatory requirements in the U.S. and globally.

• Work with partner teams to manage and continuously improve processes related to employee onboarding, offboarding, mobility, and lifecycle documentation, ensuring operational efficiency and legal compliance across jurisdictions.

• Drive employment legal support for domestic and international workforce expansion initiatives, including providing critical paralegal and project management support for drafting, reviewing, and maintaining employment agreements, contractor arrangements, handbooks, policies, and related employment and worker documentation.

• Collaborate with cross-functional partners such as People Operations, People Compliance, Recruiting, Finance, Security, and other teams to develop scalable employment legal resources and training materials.

• Build and maintain highly organized document management and tracking systems for employment matters, ensuring accuracy and confidentiality.

• Identify opportunities to automate, streamline, and modernize employment legal processes to support a fast-moving, AI-driven business environment.

• Operate as a senior escalation point for sensitive and high-priority employment matters requiring sound judgment, discretion, and proactive problem solving.

To be successful in this role, you must have:

• 10+ years experience.

• Must have in-house experience as a paralegal at a fast paced innovative tech company.

• Deeply familiar with US labor and employment law.

• Experience supporting employment litigation including discovery and coordinating with external counsel.

• Familiarity with compliance matters, including audits, government reporting, and internal investigations.

• Have solid organizational skills, effective and collaborative communication style, a strong sense of ownership, and enthusiasm about AI technology; enjoy being continually challenged and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.

Nice to have

• AI specific experience.

• Familiar with international employment laws and policies.

• Familiar with litigation and investigations, discovery, and legal operations.

• Breadth of experience across litigation/regulatory subject matter, e.g., IP, privacy, employment, antitrust, etc.

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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