Inside the $300B AI Giant: How to Land Your Dream Job at OpenAI in 2025
Here's everything you need to know - jobs, interview questions, company history, company position, and more - to get interviews, and ace them, to break into the most important company of this decade.
ChatGPT is probably the most significant product since Google Search. As far as companies to work at, that makes ChatGPT one of the most desirable.
Even at a valuation of $300B in its most recent rounds with SoftBank, to hit Google territory of $2T, it can 9x. When I ask rooms of PMs where they want to work, Open AI always comes up.
So I went into the field and did some research. I spoke with 10 people who recently interviewed at OpenAI to get you the inside scoop.
Introducing Nancy Li
I’m also collaborating with my friend Dr. Nancy Li, who has helped several candidates crack roles at OpenAI through her AI PM Certification Program. Check out her FREE AI PM Workshop, if you want more coaching.
Today’s Post
We’ve put together the complete toolkit you need to break in:
History of OpenAI
OpenAI’s Latest Position
What OpenAI is Hiring For
How Much OpenAI Pays By Level
🔒 How to Get an Interview at OpenAI
🔒 Studying Employee Backgrounds
🔒 The PM Interview Process
🔒 Top Interview Questions
🔒 Acing the Interview
1. A Short History of How OpenAI Rose to $300B Valuation
One thing we heard universally from people who have interviewed there is that they were big fans of the company.
They had been following it for a while and knew a lot about it. 6/10 people we interviewed use AI Twitter daily.
To compete with that type of competition, it pays to have a deep understanding of the various intricate storylines in OpenAI’s history.
Let’s review the facts (and avoid the rumor mill)":
Chapter 1 - The Idealistic Beginning
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and friends launched OpenAI as a nonprofit in December 2015.
Their mission? "AI that benefits all of humanity." Noble. Ambitious. Maybe naive.
Musk wasn't subtle about the stakes. He called AI "summoning the demon" and "our biggest existential threat."
The early years were low-key. Research papers. Small demos. Building the foundation.
Their first breakthrough came in August 2017. An OpenAI bot crushed pro Dota 2 players. Suddenly people outside AI circles took notice.
Trouble was brewing though (as you can see in fascinating leaked emails). Musk exited in February 2018, citing conflicts with Tesla's AI work.
This was the first crack in the founding team's unity.
Chapter 2 - The Money Reality
Did you know that OpenAI hit a wall in March 2019?
They realized training advanced AI systems cost millions. Being a pure nonprofit wouldn't cut it.
That’s when they made the famed shift to a "capped-profit" structure valued at $2.7B, abandoning the earlier ideals of being purely a non-profit.
Sam Altman's explanation was direct:
We want to increase our ability to generate resources to be able to safely deploy AGI.
Translation: Idealism needed cash.
Microsoft dropped $1B into OpenAI in July 2019. More than money – it was computing power and legitimacy.
Satya Nadella saw something before just about everyone else (way before GPT-3).
It left OpenAI with a head-scratching, byzantine ownership structure:
But the foundation was set for something massive.
Chapter 3 - The ChatGPT Explosion
GPT-3 launched with 175 billion parameters in July 2020. Insiders realized the world had changed forever. VC Semil Shah's reaction:
Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future. I've never felt this with a technology before.
DALL-E followed in 2021, generating images from text. OpenAI’s valuation hit $20B.
But the real game-changer dropped in November 2022.
ChatGPT launched with a simple tweet from Altman. No marketing. No press blitz.
The growth was insane. 100 million users in two months. Fastest-growing consumer app ever.
Microsoft presciently doubled down with another $10B in January 2023.
And Google panicked, declaring a "code red." The AI race was officially on.
Chapter 4 - The Five-Day Crisis
OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman without warning in November 2023.
![A Timeline Of Sam Altman and OpenAI [Infographic] - Venngage](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffa55f1c0-a6e4-477e-b764-420d0895a72b_1080x1350.png "A Timeline Of Sam Altman and OpenAI [Infographic] - Venngage")
Their reason? He:
Was not consistently candid in communications.
The tech world exploded. Nearly all OpenAI employees threatened to quit.
Microsoft offered to hire the entire team. Chaos reigned.
Five days later: there was a total reversal. Altman returned as CEO. The board got restructured.
Ilya Sutskever, who initially supported Altman's removal, tweeted:
I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions.
It’s going to be a Netflix special one day, but inside the company, the mission continued.
With every employee knowing just how many of the tech world’s eyes were on what they were building.
Chapter 5 - The $300B Giant in AI
Innovation accelerated throughout 2024. GPT-4o in March. Voice mode in May. Custom actions in July.
OpenAI hit a $157B valuation in December 2024. Now SoftBank is negotiating a massive $40B investment at a $300B valuation.
OpenAI is still in the hockey-stick growth part of the curve.
But Sam Altman's challenge remains the same:
We have to balance the incredible competitive pressures against our mission to make AGI that benefits all of humanity.
2. Review of OpenAI’s Latest Position
Right now, there are a lot of taste makers like me who love Claude.
But Claude right now looks like the Lyft to OpenAI’s Uber:
Claude-3-7-sonnet-thinking and OpenAI's o3-mini-2025-01-31-high are neck and neck in overall performance metrics, scoring 76.10 and 75.88 respectively.
Where OpenAI shows a slight edge strength is in coding (82.74 vs Claude's 74.54) and reasoning (89.58 vs Claude's 87.83), Anthropic maintains an edge in language tasks (59.93 vs OpenAI's 50.68).
But this performance parity at the technical level masks the significant business differences between the companies.
The fundraising and revenue numbers tell a more definitive story.
OpenAI has secured over $57.9B in funding with a valuation of $300B, dwarfing Anthropic's approximately $14.3B raised.
OpenAI's revenue is estimated at $3.5B (annualized from mid-2024), compared to Anthropic's $1B – a 3.5x advantage that demonstrates OpenAI's superior market penetration and business scaling
OpenAI has also built a significantly larger team, with approximately 3,350 employees compared to Anthropic's 1,035.
This scale advantage gives OpenAI more resources to simultaneously pursue multiple research directions, product improvements, and go-to-market strategies.
The competitive landscape extends beyond just Anthropic, with xAI's Grok models, DeepSeek's R1, Google's Gemini, and Meta's Llama all showing varying strengths in different areas.
However, none currently match the combined technical prowess and commercial success of OpenAI and Anthropic.
What’s Next
No one knows what the future holds. My guess is that multiple models survive.
Anthropic is starring with code-gen tools.
ChatGPT is starring with customers.
There are plenty of 'wrappers' like Cursor, Perplexity, and Bolt (CEO on the podcast tomorrow) succeeding as well.
The AI economy is going to be huge, with a plethora of winners.
For what it’s worth: 10/10 of the folks we talked to said they were highly bullish on OpenAI. Being bullish about where you want to work always seems to help.
Often, the word gets around.
3. What They’re Hiring For
Now, let’s take a look at what OpenAI is hiring for.
They have 305 jobs open on their job board:
11 of those are in product management or technical program management. And 3 of those are in growth.
That makes them the departments hiring the 7th and 16th most.
The big push right now is from engineering to go-to-market and roles that are critical in scaling like Product Management.
LinkedIn shows us about 40$% of the company is in research, engineering, security, or those types of roles.
The company is now growing into scaling functions.
But they are in the exponential growth phase of the company. And there are still many Applied AI, scaling, and research roles available.
Expect many more hires to come with the recent fundraising.
4. How Much OpenAI Pays
In short: OpenAI pays really well. In fact, here’s the data:
They pay in bands ranging from L2 (entry level) through L6 (director level), with total compensation packages that are extremely competitive even by tech industry standards.
Compensation by Level
L2 (Entry Level) - $236K total
Example roles: Product Specialist, Growth Associate, Analytics Engineer (Growth)
L3 - $358K total
Example roles: Product Manager, Growth Marketing Manager, Strategic Finance Analyst
L4 - $527K total
Example roles: Senior Product Manager, Product Manager for ChatGPT, Growth & GTM Strategy Lead
L5 - $1.03M total
Example roles: Product Lead for Model Behavior, Head of GTM/Innovation, Technical Program Manager
L6 - $1.34M total
Example roles: Director of Product, Global Strategic Partnerships Lead, Head of Communications
The higher you go, the more these roles pay a higher percentage in stock grants, which are Profit Participation Units that vest 25/25/25/25 over 4 years.
With a recent valuation of $300B, they're offering substantial equity components that could become extremely valuable as the company continues to grow.
Compensation for PM & Growth roles typically align with these bands. But this is software engineering data.
5. How to Get an Interview at OpenAI
Now let’s move into how to crack in. We’ve talked to 10 people and advised 3 others into getting roles. Here’s what we learned about meta-strategy:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Product Growth to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
 | A guest post by
|