careerladder.fyi › Career paths › OpenAI
How people got jobs at OpenAI
What 75 people did before they joined OpenAI: where they worked, what they studied, which role they came in through, and how long it took.
75
people in our data got there
68%
had a graduate degree first (of those listing one)
14
typical years since first job
- The most common step right before: from other companies (52%).
- The most common way in was Business & operations (21% joined in that kind of role).
- Of those who list their education, 68% had a graduate degree before arriving and 17% a PhD.
- The typical person arrived about 14 years after their first job.
- The most common earlier employer: Google (17% had worked there).
How OpenAI compares
- 28% came straight from Big Tech, above the 17% across other frontier AI labs.
Among people who list their education; places with at least 10 such people.
Show as a table
| People listing education | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Google DeepMind | 58 | 41% |
| World Labs | 39 | 33% |
| Physical Intelligence | 31 | 32% |
| Sakana AI | 41 | 29% |
| Cohere | 40 | 28% |
| Hugging Face | 34 | 24% |
| Stability AI | 40 | 22% |
| SpaceXAI | 17 | 18% |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 29 | 17% |
| OpenAI (this page) | 41 | 17% |
| Anthropic | 28 | 14% |
| Black Forest Labs | 32 | 12% |
| EleutherAI | 26 | 12% |
| Reflection | 20 | 10% |
| Mistral AI | 36 | 8% |
| Skild AI | 39 | 8% |
| Poolside | 31 | 6% |
| Cognition | 27 | 4% |
| Perplexity | 24 | <1% |
Show as a table
| Median years | ||
|---|---|---|
| SpaceXAI | 18 yrs | |
| Anthropic | 15 yrs | |
| Mistral AI | 15 yrs | |
| OpenAI (this page) | 14 yrs | |
| Perplexity | 14 yrs | |
| Reflection | 14 yrs | |
| Thinking Machines Lab | 14 yrs | |
| Stability AI | 14 yrs | |
| Poolside | 13 yrs | |
| Cognition | 13 yrs | |
| Cohere | 13 yrs | |
| Black Forest Labs | 10 yrs | |
| Physical Intelligence | 10 yrs | |
| Google DeepMind | 10 yrs | |
| Sakana AI | 9 yrs | |
| Skild AI | 9 yrs | |
| World Labs | 8 yrs | |
| Hugging Face | 8 yrs | |
| EleutherAI | 5 yrs |
Which role they joined in
Kinds of role with fewer than 5 people are combined into "All other roles".
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Business & operations | 16 | 21% |
| Member of technical staff | 12 | 16% |
| Data science & ML | 12 | 16% |
| All other roles | 29 | 39% |
| Software engineering | 6 | 8% |
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Member of Technical Staff | 10 | 13% |
What they did right before
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| From other companies | 39 | 52% |
| From Big Tech | 21 | 28% |
| From frontier AI labs | 5 | 7% |
| Other | 10 | 13% |
Where they worked before
A person can count under more than one employer.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 13 | 17% | |
| Meta | 10 | 13% |
| Amazon | 6 | 8% |
| Stanford University | 6 | 8% |
| Microsoft | 6 | 8% |
| Stripe | 5 | 7% |
Education
Among the 41 of 75 people who list their education.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's | 13 | 32% |
| Master's | 18 | 44% |
| MBA | 3 | 7% |
| PhD | 7 | 17% |
A person can count under more than one school.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| Columbia University | 8 | 11% |
| Stanford University | 6 | 8% |
| Georgia Tech | 5 | 7% |
| NYU | 5 | 7% |
How much experience they had
Among the 75 of 75 people with an earlier job listed.
Show as a table
| People | Share | |
|---|---|---|
| 1-3 years | 3 | 4% |
| 3-5 years | 3 | 4% |
| 5-8 years | 6 | 8% |
| 8-12 years | 16 | 21% |
| 12+ years | 47 | 63% |
Where would your path lead?
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to OpenAI, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to OpenAI →
Paste your LinkedIn or resume and see the ladders people like you climbed to OpenAI, and how each step changes your chances.
Plan my path to OpenAI →
Related
How these numbers are made. From 3k+ public career histories collected for careerladder.fyi (dated jobs, degrees and publications). The collection was built around particular employers, so people who reached well-known tech, AI and finance employers are over-represented: read shares as "among people in this dataset", not as hiring odds. Names are shown only when at least 5 people are behind them; smaller groups are combined into "Other". No individual profile is shown. Updated November 2026.