Senior Counsel, Sanctions and Trade Compliance

About the Team

OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work in the legal and compliance field, this team is for you. The team comprises professionals from diverse fields, including technology, AI, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax law, regulatory, and litigation.

About the Role

As a member of our Security Legal team, you will be responsible for managing and evolving OpenAI’s sanctions compliance program, from developing an overall compliance strategy, mapping out screening architecture and workflow designs, and working cross functionally with colleagues on monitoring, metrics, and continuous improvement. You will manage sanctions compliance policy and strategy for one of the most closely watched and globally impactful technology platforms in the world, and have real ownership and the chance to develop systems that scale globally as the company and our technology continues to evolve. You’ll also collaborate on adjacent trade compliance and security issues.

This role can be hybrid or remote and based in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., New York, or Seattle. 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:

• Advise cross-functional teams on compliance and legal requirements applicable to OpenAI’s products and services under U.S. and international sanctions regimes.

• Develop sanctions compliance strategies and processes at a global scale for a frontier AI company operating across jurisdictions and products.

• Partner closely with cross-functional teams across Finance, Integrity, GRC, and Engineering to implement sanctions screening and controls that are deeply embedded into business workflows.

• Own compliance documentation and reporting, including policies, standards, dashboards, metrics, and escalation frameworks to enable rapid monitoring, assessment, and improvement of compliance processes

• Work with cross-functional teams to deeply understand and integrate compliance systems and tools, ensuring compliance checks are seamless, reliable, and adaptable as OpenAI evolves.

• Lead ongoing reviews and risk assessments to ensure the continued effectiveness of our compliance controls and processes.

• Manage and coordinate vendors and other third parties who support OpenAI’s compliance operations.

• Assist in the development of trade compliance training materials for our cross-functional partners and business teams.

• Explore and deploy AI tools to enhance and streamline OpenAI’s trade compliance efforts.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience in the trade compliance field, including developing and implementing trade compliance programs at a large, technology-focused company.

• Hold a J.D. from an accredited law school and maintain an active license to practice law, in good standing, in at least one U.S. jurisdiction.

• Bring a sophisticated understanding of how US and international sanctions laws apply to multinational US companies.

• Have successfully embedded comprehensive compliance programs and incorporated compliance processes into complex business workflows without slowing innovation.

• Enjoy learning new systems and becoming the go-to expert in the systems and technical tools required for your job.

• Are highly skilled at program management, including organizing complex systems, tasks, processes, and documentation.

• Communicate in a way that builds trust with cross-functional teams, from engineers to business leaders.

• Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being continually challenged, and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.

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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