OpenAI job seekers, listen up.
Ty Geri joined the AI lab in 2025 as a product manager. Business Insider asked for his advice on landing a job at OpenAI — and he said that enthusiasm was key.
“I think OpenAI tries to hire people who are really passionate, and care, and want to be a part of this mission,” he said.
Geri’s advice is agnostic of role, he said: engineer, researcher, product manager, data scientist, whatever.
His other advice was to use the company’s products. That doesn’t mean he expects all the products to work instantaneously. Some will be “a little rough today,” he said, but OpenAI is looking for people who are willing to “push on the frontiers.”
“Try to bring these products into your life, into your workflows,” Geri advised.
In July, a former OpenAI intern shared his advice with Business Insider. He said: go broad, specialize, and build. Another OpenAI employee said he got his job thanks in part to a cold DM on LinkedIn.
Sundeep Teki, a career coach who helps place talent at AI companies, told Business Insider in June that OpenAI had one of the hardest technical interviews in the industry. So, study up. Also, the labs sometimes recruit people from their public profiles, so keep contributing to that GitHub.
As for Geri, he said that the messiness of experimentation was core to OpenAI’s culture. The company expects “a lot of building in public,” he said.
Staffers at the company want to see what you’re building and try it out for themselves, Geri said. He described a fallacy of work: “You sit in a dark room, you come out three years later, and you’re like: ‘Voila, magic.'” That doesn’t fly at OpenAI.
“It definitely stresses me out,” he said, “but I think it’s part of the fun.”
Among OpenAI employees, Geri said that there was a willingness to try new things. If the product you put out is “not quite it yet,” Geri said that others at the company will try again.
The culture of experimentation and “big swings,” as Geri calls them, is also what makes OpenAI different from his prior job at Google.
“Larger companies in the space can sometimes be a little bit slower,” he said.
