Is OpenAI Still Hiring? 797 Open Roles, Counted September 14, 2026

Yes. On September 14, 2026 we counted 797 open roles on OpenAI’s own careers board — 16 more than the 781 we counted on the same board last Monday. Sixty-four postings were added during those seven days and forty-eight came down, which is what a hiring company looks like from the outside: churn on top of slow growth, not a freeze.

That number is worth stating plainly because the pages that rank for this question disagree with it, and with each other. When we searched is openai still hiring this morning, the titles Google returned included a Glassdoor page advertising “257 Open Positions” and an Indeed page titled “200 Openai Jobs.” Those are third-party indexes of a board they do not control. We read the board itself.

This is the weekly hiring report, so here is the whole board

Every Monday we read the public careers feeds of the companies building frontier models, coding agents, evaluation pipelines, humanoid robots and self-driving cars, and we write down what is there. On September 14 that came to 3,795 open roles across 19 boards, of which 3,004 were in the United States and 2,226 printed a pay range.

Against last Monday the whole set moved by eleven postings — 217 added, 206 removed. A net change of eleven on a base of 3,784 is, in practice, flat. The interesting movement is underneath it.

Software went up and hardware went down. Frontier labs added 18 postings, data-and-evaluation companies 15, coding-agent companies 11. Humanoid robotics lost 14 and autonomous driving lost 15. One week is one week and we are not going to call that a trend on a single reading — but it is the third straight week our robot-side boards have been flat or negative, and two specific companies stand out: Figure AI and Agility Robotics posted nothing new at all in seven days, while removing 10 and 4 postings respectively.

Counted from each employer’s own public job feed on September 7 and September 14, 2026. Anthropic, xAI and Waymo restamp their whole board nightly, so “added” and “removed” for those three are computed by comparing posting IDs, not timestamps. Google DeepMind is the twentieth board we track; its feed has returned a 404 since at least September 7 and is excluded from every number above.

What OpenAI is actually advertising

Of the 797 roles, 656 are in the United States, and 567 of the 797 sit in San Francisco. After that the board thins out fast: Singapore 32, Tokyo 23, Washington DC 21, New York 20, London 19, Dublin 15. If you are not in the Bay Area, the board is much smaller than its headline number suggests.

The bigger surprise is the department split. People picture a research lab; the board describes a company going to market.

Go To Market (137), Scaling (113) and Applied AI (103) hold 353 of the 797 postings between them. Research holds 72. Sales, infrastructure and deployment outnumber research roughly five to one. That is not a criticism of the company — it is what a company does when it has a product people pay for — but it should change what you conclude from the sentence “OpenAI is hiring.”

The thing we got wrong until today

Here is the finding that made us change our own code this morning, and it applies well beyond OpenAI.

Job feeds carry a machine-readable remote flag. On OpenAI’s feed, 523 of the 797 postings carry it. The same feed also carries the employer’s own workplace classification, and that field says something very different: 30 Remote, 493 Hybrid, 31 On-site, and 243 unspecified.

So the flag that a scraper reads as “remote” is attached, 493 times, to a job the employer has classified as hybrid — meaning you are expected in that San Francisco office on a schedule. Until this morning our own jobs board counted the flag. It now counts the employer’s classification. Our published US remote count for OpenAI fell from 415 to 31 as a result, and the site-wide US remote count fell from 830 to 313.

The gap is not uniform, which is why it is worth checking per company rather than assuming. ElevenLabs flags 201 and classifies 195 as remote — the flag is nearly honest there. Cohere flags 134 and classifies 102. But Replit flags 76 and classifies 6, and Perplexity flags 49 and classifies zero. If you have been filtering an aggregator for remote AI jobs and wondering why the interviews keep turning into relocation conversations, this is a large part of why.

We have written before about whether AI engineering jobs are actually remote; this week’s count is the sharpest evidence we have gathered that the answer depends on which field you read, not which box you tick.

Pay, and the part nobody wants to hear about entry level

OpenAI publishes a salary range on 635 of its 656 US postings — 97%, which is far above what most employers do and a genuine convenience for applicants. The midpoint of those ranges has a median of $309,000. The lowest figure printed anywhere on the board is $125,000; the highest is $850,000.

Those are real numbers from the postings themselves, and they describe senior hiring. Which leads to the part we get asked about most: 3 of the 656 US roles carry an entry-level title. Three. Across all 19 boards we counted 109 entry-level titles out of 3,004 US postings, or about 3.6%.

If you are early-career, the honest read is that frontier labs are not where the door is. The door is in the adjacent infrastructure — data centers, electrical trades, technician work — which is why xAI’s Memphis build-out keeps showing up in our entry-level counts (23 this week) while OpenAI shows 3. We have written separate guides on entry-level AI jobs with no experience, becoming a data center technician and AI jobs that don’t require coding.

What to do with this

• Apply on the employer’s own page, not an index. The gap between 797 and the “200” and “257” figures in search results this morning is the gap between a live board and a cached copy of one.
• Read the workplace field, not the remote tag. On the posting itself, look for the words Hybrid, On-site or Remote. If it says hybrid and you need remote, that is a no, regardless of what the listing was tagged.
• If you are early-career, widen out from the labs. Three entry-level roles at OpenAI against 23 at xAI Memphis is the whole strategy argument in one line.
• Check dates before you apply. Forty-eight OpenAI postings disappeared in seven days. We keep a note on whether old postings are worth applying to.
• Browse the live set. Every role above, with its pay band and a button to the employer’s own application page, is on our AI jobs board.

If you want to go deeper

Is OpenAI hiring more than Anthropic? Yes, by volume: 797 to 596 this Monday. Anthropic added 4 net and had the second-highest churn on the board (50 added, 46 removed). We keep a standing page on whether Anthropic is hiring right now and a comparison of how to get a job at either.

Who pays the most? Not always who you would guess, and the medians move week to week — see which AI company pays the most. On why the bands are so wide in the first place, see why salary ranges are so wide and why some postings show no salary at all.

Do you need a PhD? On this board, mostly no — 72 of 797 postings are research. We looked at the evidence in do you need a PhD to work in AI.

Worth watching this week

Questions people actually ask about this

Is OpenAI still hiring?

Yes. On September 14, 2026 its own careers board listed 797 open roles, up from 781 on September 7. Sixty-four postings were added and forty-eight removed during that week.

Why do job sites show different numbers of OpenAI jobs?

Because most of them index a copy. On September 14 the search results for this question included a Glassdoor page titled “257 Open Positions” and an Indeed page titled “200 Openai Jobs,” while the company’s own feed returned 797. Aggregators re-crawl on their own schedule, drop postings they cannot parse, and often show only roles in your detected country.

How many OpenAI jobs are remote?

Thirty, as the company classifies them. A remote flag appears on 523 postings, but OpenAI’s own workplace field marks 30 as Remote, 493 as Hybrid, 31 as On-site and leaves 243 unspecified. Hybrid means scheduled days in the office, most often San Francisco.

Does OpenAI hire entry-level candidates?

Rarely. Three of its 656 US postings carried an entry-level title on September 14, 2026. Across all 19 boards we track, 109 of 3,004 US postings were entry-level, about 3.6%.

How much do OpenAI jobs pay?

The company publishes a range on 635 of its 656 US postings. The median midpoint of those ranges is $309,000. The lowest figure printed on the board is $125,000 and the highest is $850,000. These are the employer’s own published bands, not estimates.

Is OpenAI hiring more than Anthropic?

By volume, yes: 797 against 596 on September 14, 2026. Anthropic grew by 4 net that week against OpenAI’s 16, with similar churn underneath (50 added, 46 removed).

Counted on September 14, 2026 from each employer’s own public job feed. Numbers change daily; the live set is on the tracker and the board. Have a request? Ask the desk on our jobs page. One short email a month.