Certification Architect
OpenAI · San Francisco, California
About the Team
Customer Education helps customers build the practical skills and confidence to use AI and OpenAI products safely and effectively. We bring together customer insight, learning and enablement expertise, product signals, and measurement to help organizations move from access to durable adoption.
Within Customer Education, the Certification team helps individuals demonstrate competence for in-demand AI skills and helps customers and partners validate that their workforce has the skills they need to meet their AI-enabled business goals. Our work centers on the belief that learners should understand where to go to build skills and capabilities, how to demonstrate them, and what to pursue next. Similarly, Enterprise leaders should understand what each credential signifies and how it supports workforce readiness. We do this with transparency for the overall OpenAI credential framework and providing trusted, role-based certifications that verify practical capability.
About the Role
As Certification Architect, you will define the framework, standards, and assessment architecture that make OpenAI certifications a trusted signal of demonstrated capability.
This is a senior hands-on role on the Certification team that will build reusable foundations for a growing portfolio: clear competency standards, defensible assessments, scalable in-product delivery, and evidence of continued competence.
We’re looking for someone who combines deep certification and assessment expertise with the ability to innovate new and meaningful ways to demonstrate practical AI competence. You will work closely with certification specialists, technical subject matter experts, learning product and engineering teams, operations and policy partners, and stakeholders across the go-to-market organization.
The program is early, and you will help shape how people demonstrate capability in ChatGPT and Codex. Success means building standards that are rigorous, usable, and adaptable as AI technology and professional roles evolve.
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:
- Own the credential framework and shared competency standards, distinguishing completed learning, demonstrated skills, and formal certification, with clear capability claims and evidence requirements for each.
- Establish reusable assessment standards and guidance for certification pods across job-task analysis, competency models, assessment blueprints, performance tasks, scoring rubrics, and passing standards.
- Own the validation approach and evidence documentation requirements. Partner with pod leaders to validate certification proposals against job relevance, representative task coverage, scoring consistency, fairness, and appropriate interpretation of results.
- Define exam delivery architecture and requirements with product, engineering, operations, and third parties, spanning registration, identity verification, monitoring, permitted assistance, evidence capture, scoring, human review, appeals, customer support, and record management.
- Define expectations for continued competence validation post-assessment.
- Partner with learning, operations, policy, legal, privacy, security, and accessibility teams to align preparation with competencies while protecting assessment integrity and establishing appropriate evidence access, retention, accommodations, and review processes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have 10+ years experience designing and delivering professional technical IT industry certifications or assessments that support credible claims about what people can do.
- Have led design of performance-based assessments for AI, software development, technical architecture, or customer-facing implementation roles.
- Have built credential frameworks, competency models, or shared assessment standards that work across multiple roles or programs.
- Have led job-task analysis, assessment blueprints, performance-based assessment, rubric design, standard setting, and the evidence needed to support valid and fair certification decisions.
- Can translate assessment experience requirements into exam delivery specifications for third parties and learning product teams.
- Have worked closely with certification specialists, psychometricians and subject matter experts to validate assessment and scoring standards and improve assessment quality.
- Communicate complex standards clearly to technical and nontechnical partners, and build alignment across teams without relying on formal authority.
- Enjoy hands-on work, from drafting standards and reviewing assessment designs to resolving practical delivery tradeoffs with a small team.
- Exercise sound judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing rigor, candidate experience, delivery feasibility, and the pace of technology change.
- Care deeply about accessibility, fairness, and the integrity of credentials that individuals and employers rely on.
- Build reusable approaches while recognizing where different roles need distinct competency models, tasks, and evidence.
Additional experience that would be helpful includes:
- Validating AI-assisted scoring, model evaluations, or other automated approaches to evaluating human performance.
- Working with secure assessment delivery, identity verification, credential issuance, learner records, or assessment technology providers.
- Developing innovative approaches to recertification, ongoing competence, or assessment of authentic work.
- Building products that serve both individual users and organizations.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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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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.