OpenAI DevDay, Event Project Lead (Contract)

Contingent Worker - San Francisco / Remote, U.S.

Contract through end of October 2026

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.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

About The Role

This Project Lead contract role will work alongside the Senior Producer and Global Head of Events to help drive the planning and execution of OpenAI DevDay, our flagship developer conference. This person will serve as a central project-management lead across the full program, ensuring the team has clear timelines, clean ownership, fast decision-making, strong budget visibility, and consistent alignment across every major workstream.

The ideal candidate is a deeply experienced event production project lead who has managed the moving parts of a large, high-stakes live event and knows how to keep a complex team operating with clarity and momentum. They should be comfortable driving progress across various teams including production, content, creative, guest experience, registration, security, legal, finance, vendors, and executive stakeholders, while knowing when to escalate, when to unblock, and when to bring decisions back to the right owners.

This contingent assignment is expected to run through the end of Fall 2026.

In this role, you will:

• Own and maintain the overall DevDay project plan, including workbacks, critical milestones, dependencies, deadlines, decision points, and risk tracking from planning through post-event wrap.
• Drive the operating cadence for the program, including cross-functional meetings, status updates, decision logs, action trackers, and leadership readouts.
• Partner with the Senior Producer and Global Head of Events to keep the overall program moving, ensuring open questions are resolved quickly and the right stakeholders are aligned at the right moments.
• Track and manage the event budget in partnership with Events leadership, finance, procurement, and production partners, including forecasts, committed spend, invoices, SOWs, approvals, and budget risks.
• Coordinate closely across legal, finance, procurement, security, communications, content, design, product, engineering, workplace, registration, guest experience, technical production, and external vendors to ensure all workstreams are progressing against plan.
• Maintain the central source of truth for the project, ensuring plans, timelines, owners, deliverables, meeting notes, approvals, and escalation paths are current and easy for teams to use.
• Anticipate blockers before they become urgent, surface tradeoffs clearly, and help teams move through ambiguity without losing pace or quality.
• Support onsite execution during load-in, rehearsals, show days, and wrap, helping coordinate issue triage, team communications, schedule changes, and stakeholder updates.
• Partner on post-event reporting, retrospectives, and documentation so key learnings, metrics, and operational improvements are captured for future DevDay planning.
  
  

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 5+ years of experience project managing large-scale event productions, ideally including flagship conferences, developer events, product launches, executive programs, or high-profile technology events.
• Experience managing complex event workbacks across many workstreams, stakeholders, vendors, and approval paths.
• Strong budget-management experience, including tracking large event budgets, forecasting spend, managing vendor costs, and partnering with finance and procurement teams.
• Excellent executive presence and judgment, with the ability to drive fast alignment across senior leaders and cross-functional partners.
• A strong understanding of live event production, including vendor management, venue operations, production schedules, rehearsals, show flow, guest experience, and onsite execution.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with a talent for creating clear project documentation, crisp updates, and useful decision frameworks.
• Comfort operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where priorities shift and timelines are tight.
• A calm, highly organized, low-ego working style; you know how to bring order to complexity without adding unnecessary process.
• Familiarity with project management and event operations tools and how to use AI models to drive efficiency.
• A passion for OpenAI's mission and excitement about helping deliver a world-class experience for the developer community.