OpenAI today lists 19 open positions tied directly to its ads business on the careers page at openai.com, with roles spread across San Francisco, New York City, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Sao Paulo. Taken together, the postings map out something more concrete than a hiring plan - they sketch the geographic shape of an advertising business that has so far operated almost entirely within the United States.
The careers page, captured on May 6, 2026, filters to those 19 ads-related roles out of a total 658 open positions at the company. That ratio is notable. Ads Solutions roles make up roughly 2.9 percent of all current OpenAI vacancies, a meaningful share for a monetization unit that only formally began accepting advertisers on February 6, 2026.
What the job listings show
The positions span several distinct functional areas. The largest cluster sits inside the Ads Solutions team itself, covering both Customer Success Manager and Regional Client Partner roles. Customer Success Managers are listed for Seoul, Tokyo, London, Sydney, Sao Paulo, and two unspecified locations. Regional Client Partners follow nearly the same geographic template - London, Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paulo - with the addition of a Spanish-speaking remote role based in the United States.
That parallel structure is not accidental. In advertising platforms, Customer Success Managers handle the day-to-day health of existing advertiser relationships. Regional Client Partners are typically responsible for bringing new accounts onto the platform and managing the commercial side of larger partnerships. Having both functions listed for the same set of cities suggests OpenAI intends to build self-contained local teams rather than relying on a centralized global operation managed out of San Francisco.
Beyond those two roles, the full list includes a Head of SMB Ads Marketing based in San Francisco, a Revenue Operations Lead also in San Francisco, a Solutions Engineering position in New York City, a Strategic Finance role in San Francisco, a Software Engineer, Ads Monetization, Revenue Platform position under Applied AI Engineering in San Francisco, and a Trust and Safety Operations Analyst for User Operations, also in San Francisco.
The Software Engineer, Ads Monetization, Revenue Platform role is worth examining on its own terms. It sits inside Applied AI Engineering, not inside the Ads Solutions or Go To Market teams. That placement signals that OpenAI is treating the revenue platform as an engineering problem requiring deep technical investment, not simply a sales support function. The role implies work on systems that handle how ad dollars actually flow through the platform - bidding logic, impression counting, billing reconciliation, and the data pipelines that connect advertiser spend to platform inventory.
The London job description in detail
According to the Customer Success Manager posting for the London office, the role sits "at the intersection of relationship management, strategy, and execution." The document describes a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office, with relocation assistance available. The listed responsibilities include owning relationships with a portfolio of advertising partners, guiding advertisers through onboarding and campaign launches, analysing campaign performance, identifying opportunities to expand partnerships through incremental investment, and surfacing advertiser feedback to inform product improvements.
The experience requirements are instructive. According to the same posting, candidates should have "3+ years of experience in digital advertising, account management, customer success, consulting or a related client-facing role," along with "experience managing advertiser or agency relationships in a platform, publisher, or adtech environment." SQL and advanced spreadsheet skills are listed, reflecting that the role involves direct engagement with performance data rather than purely relationship management.
The combination of requirements - agency relationship experience, platform familiarity, data querying skills - mirrors what established digital advertising platforms like Google or Meta would demand for similar positions. OpenAI is recruiting with expectations shaped by the existing ad tech industry, not building from scratch with generalist hires.
Geographic signals and what they imply
The cities chosen for Regional Client Partner and Customer Success Manager roles are not arbitrary. Tokyo and Seoul represent the two largest advertising markets in Asia after China, both with substantial programmatic infrastructure and active demand from global brands. London is the primary hub for European advertising spend and for the holding company networks - WPP, Publicis, and others - that have already been confirmed as early ChatGPT advertising partners. Sydney covers Australia and New Zealand, the two markets that joined the ChatGPT advertising pilot on March 26, 2026 alongside Canada when OpenAI announced it had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks. Sao Paulo anchors Latin America, the largest ad market in the region and one with rapidly growing digital advertising penetration.
What is conspicuously absent from the current list is continental Europe - no roles in Paris, Amsterdam, or Berlin. That gap is not necessarily permanent, but it does indicate that OpenAI's initial international advertiser team will be weighted toward English-language markets and the Asia-Pacific region before moving into markets where regulatory complexity, particularly under GDPR and the EU AI Act, may require additional groundwork.
Canada, which was included in the March 26 pilot expansion, also does not have a dedicated local office role listed. That could indicate Canada will be managed from New York or San Francisco, or simply that hiring there comes in a later wave.
Context: where the ad platform stands
The hiring push comes at a specific moment in the development of OpenAI's advertising business. On May 5, 2026, OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager beta to all US advertisers, adding CPC bidding alongside the existing CPMmodel, and confirmed the launch of a Conversions API and pixel-based measurement tools. The self-serve interface is available at ads.openai.com. Recommended starting bids under the CPC model sit at $3 to $5 per click, while the default CPM rate remains $60.
That May 5 announcement was itself the most significant operational expansion since the pilot began in February. According to OpenAI's documentation cited in that rollout, the platform supports three-tier campaign management - Campaign, Ad Group, and Ad - with targeting driven by context hints rather than standard audience segments. The shift to self-serve is the mechanism by which advertising platforms have historically moved from controlled pilots to open markets.
The Conversions API launch is particularly relevant to the international hiring picture. As PPC Land reported in April 2026, attribution had been one of the most persistent criticisms of the ChatGPT ad platform since inception - advertisers could not measure what happened after someone saw or clicked an ad. The pixel now closes that gap, at least in principle. For international advertisers, measurement infrastructure is often the prerequisite for shifting budget from existing channels.
Vijaye Raji, CTO of Applications at OpenAI, described the three launches - self-service ads manager, CPC bidding, and Conversions API plus pixel - on LinkedIn on May 6: "Really excited about three new ads launches: self-service ads manager, CPC bidding, and our Conversions API + pixel. Together, these make it easier for businesses to buy ChatGPT ads and understand what's actually working. Self-service is the one I'm most excited about, because it opens this up to a lot more businesses, especially small businesses trying to find customers and grow."
In the same post, Raji noted that "these shipped less than three months after our first ads launch in ChatGPT," describing the pace as "wild" given the size of the team involved. He also confirmed that OpenAI is "hiring across ads and monetization," pointing directly to the same careers page reflected in the job listings above.
The SMB signal
The Head of SMB Ads Marketing role listed in San Francisco deserves separate attention. SMB - small and medium-sized businesses - has been an explicit priority for OpenAI since the self-serve rollout. Raji's LinkedIn post specifically called out small businesses as a target group for the self-serve expansion. The $50,000 minimum spend threshold that replaced the original $200,000 to $250,000 floor in April 2026 was itself a step toward the SMB market. The self-serve beta with no minimum spend drops that barrier entirely.
An SMB-focused marketing head is the kind of hire that signals OpenAI is building dedicated acquisition infrastructure for the lower end of the market, rather than treating small businesses as an overflow category from enterprise sales. According to Reuters, nearly 80 percent of small- and medium-sized businesses had expressed interest in buying ChatGPT placements as of March 26, 2026. Converting expressed interest into active advertisers across multiple countries requires a different playbook than managing holding company relationships.
Revenue Operations and what it tracks
The Revenue Operations Lead role, based in San Francisco and listed under the Ads Solutions team, typically handles the systems and data infrastructure that connects sales activity to revenue outcomes - pipeline tracking, forecasting, tooling, and process design. In early-stage advertising businesses, revenue operations often functions as the operational backbone that allows the sales team to scale without losing visibility into performance.
Listing a Revenue Operations Lead at this stage - before international teams are even hired - suggests OpenAI is building that infrastructure now, in anticipation of the complexity that comes with managing advertisers across multiple currencies, contract structures, and regulatory environments.
The pace of build-out
The speed of this hiring push is worth quantifying. OpenAI posted its first advertising-related technical role in September 2025, seeking a Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer. By the time the pilot launched in February 2026, the company had assembled enough of a team to begin accepting advertisers. By March 26, the pilot had crossed $100 million in annualized revenue and expanded to three new countries. By May 5, a self-serve interface, a new bidding model, and a Conversions API were all live.
The 19 open roles visible today represent the next stage: building the human infrastructure to support what the technical infrastructure now enables. Client partners and customer success managers are the people who translate platform capabilities into advertiser outcomes, and who surface the friction points that guide future product decisions.
Raji acknowledged both the scale of the challenge and the composition of the team building it: "We're still very early here. The goal is to build ads in a way that supports broader access to powerful AI, while staying true to the principles that matter: ChatGPT's answers stay independent, conversations stay private, and users stay in control."
He also offered a direct response to a commenter who questioned whether conversational data would be used for ad targeting: "We don't share any conversational data with anyone. Ads are not shown on any content that is sensitive."
Why this matters for the marketing community
For marketing professionals, the geographic spread of the open roles provides something the product announcements alone do not: a timeline for when non-US advertisers can reasonably expect direct engagement from OpenAI's own team. Advertisers in Tokyo or Seoul currently have no local point of contact at OpenAI. The hiring of Regional Client Partners and Customer Success Managers in those cities is a precondition for the kind of direct advertiser relationships that drive budget allocation decisions at scale.
The addition of CPC bidding, noted in the Conversions API launch, directly addresses a structural objection from performance marketers. CPM-only models ask advertisers to pay for attention without guaranteeing action - a reasonable ask on premium video or brand-safe environments, but harder to justify for direct response objectives. CPC aligns payment with a downstream signal. Combined with pixel-based attribution, the platform now offers the basic measurement loop that performance buyers have required from every channel they have ever committed budget to.
The question of whether ChatGPT ads convert is beginning to have data behind it. Internal Criteo data from 500 US retailers, observed in February 2026, found that users referred from LLM platforms converted at approximately 1.5 times the rate of other referral channels - a narrow sample, but a directional signal that has circulated widely in the industry.
For the 19 cities represented across the open roles, the implication is that OpenAI expects advertisers in those markets to have their own conversion stories to tell - and wants staff in place to help them tell them.
Timeline
- September 24, 2025 - OpenAI posts its first advertising-related technical job, seeking a Growth Paid Marketing Platform Engineer to build campaign management and attribution systems
- December 2, 2025 - OpenAI issues an internal "code red" directive, pausing advertising development and redirecting resources toward core product quality
- January 16, 2026 - OpenAI formally confirms plans to test advertising in ChatGPT for US Free and Go tier users
- February 6, 2026 - OpenAI begins accepting advertisers; early participants include Target, Ford, Mrs. Meyer's, and Adobe
- February 9, 2026 - ChatGPT advertising pilot formally launches in the United States at a $60 CPM; ads appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses for logged-in adult Free and Go users
- March 2, 2026 - Criteo confirmed as the first formal ad tech partner to the ChatGPT pilot, connecting approximately 17,000 advertisers to the platform
- March 26, 2026 - ChatGPT advertising pilot crosses $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks; OpenAI announces expansion to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; David Dugan named to lead global advertising solutions
- April 2026 - Minimum advertiser spend threshold cut from $250,000 to $50,000; early self-serve ads manager confirmed in testing with select advertisers; CPMs reported as low as $25 via Criteo
- May 5, 2026 - OpenAI opens self-serve Ads Manager beta to all US businesses, adding CPC bidding, Conversions API, and pixel measurement; minimum spend requirement dropped
- May 6, 2026 - OpenAI careers page lists 19 open ads-related roles spanning San Francisco, New York City, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Sao Paulo
Summary
Who: OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, currently employing more than 3,400 people across 658 open roles globally.
What: OpenAI today lists 19 open positions tied to its advertising business, including Customer Success Manager and Regional Client Partner roles in Tokyo, Seoul, London, Sydney, and Sao Paulo, alongside technical and marketing roles in San Francisco and New York City. The postings follow the May 5, 2026 launch of a self-serve Ads Manager beta for US advertisers, CPC bidding, and a Conversions API with pixel-based measurement.
When: The job listings are live as of May 6, 2026, approximately three months after the ChatGPT advertising pilot formally launched on February 9, 2026.
Where: Roles are distributed across seven cities: San Francisco, New York City, London, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Sao Paulo. The advertising pilot currently serves Free and Go users in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Continental Europe is not yet represented in the hiring.
Why: The global hiring push maps directly onto OpenAI's stated ambition to scale the ChatGPT advertising business beyond the US pilot. The addition of local client-facing staff in major advertising markets is the operational precondition for international advertiser relationships at scale. The company has projected, according to reporting by The Information, that advertising could generate $102 billion in revenue by 2030 - a figure that requires the kind of self-serve infrastructure and international presence these roles are designed to build.