Head of Econ Lab

About the team

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The OpenAI Foundation advances that mission directly, starting with a commitment across four programs: AI Resilience, Health & Curing Diseases, AI for Civil Society.

AI Resilience helps society absorb, adapt to, and benefit from increasingly capable AI systems, with work across biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, children and youth, and the future of the economy. The team is small and fast-moving with many workstreams, candidates, advisors, grantees, board touchpoints, and special projects in flight. The work requires a high level of judgment and discretion, but it also depends on practical operational excellence: clean trackers, reliable follow-up, clear handoffs, and shared context that people can actually find and use.

About the role

The OpenAI Foundation is committing an initial $250M to grants, partnerships, and direct work aimed at building secure and abundant economic futures. You can read more about that announcement here. 

We are looking for a Head of the Econ Lab: someone who can lead a team to figure out what the economics of transformative AI actually means.

If AI systems reach and exceed human-level capability on most economically valuable work, the standard toolkit likely won't cut it. The Econ Lab exists to resolve that uncertainty: a small team running a portfolio of bets — field-building among AGI-serious economic thinkers, speculative infrastructure like world-simulators, new economic frameworks, and whatever else turns out to matter.

You will own that portfolio/ selecting which research agendas or projects to fund, recruiting the people to run them, working across  grants, fellowships, commissioned research, discontinuing what isn't working, and doubling down on what is. The right person has done serious economic work in the real world — government, industry, or markets — and takes the possibility of transformative AI seriously.

In this role, you will

• Define the lab's operating thesis: how do you discover the answer to what the economics of transformative AI means and what policies might be useful.
• Build and own the portfolio: convert proposals and inbound interest into a small number of fundable, owned bets.
• Hire a small team of complementary thinkers — for example a grounded real-world economist, a growth or theory economist, and a leader in gradual disempowerment — rather than one profile expected to have all the answers.
• Decide for each pilot/experiment, whether the right vehicle is an internal hire, a grant, a fellowship, an advisor relationship, or externally commissioned research.
• Run the cadence that keeps independently-run bets talking to each other — lab meetings, portfolio reviews, peer critique — so lessons from one bet reach the others.
• Own the relationship with the field: the economists, policy entrepreneurs, and institution builders reaching out, and the smaller number who should become collaborators, grantees, or hires.
• Create the decision artifacts leadership needs to trust the portfolio without reviewing every proposal.

You'll thrive in this role if you

• Have an economics or policy background grounded in the world rather than only in the academy; you have seen firsthand how theory has to interact with reality. 
• Can tell a compelling-sounding proposal from a good one, and are comfortable saying no to smart, credentialed people.
• Are comfortable holding several unrelated bets at once without needing them to resolve into one tidy theory before funding them.
• Can describe this work honestly in language that lands with both an AGI-pilled audience and a traditional economist.
• Have experience navigating politically sensitive or heavily scrutinized work.

Compensation

The annual base salary range for this role is $300,000 to $600,000 USD.

This range reflects our good-faith estimate of the base salary we reasonably expect to pay for this position upon hire. Actual base salary will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, skills, expertise, the scope of the role, and work location, as applicable.

This salary range does not include benefits or any other compensation for which the role may be eligible.

Equal Opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.