Head of Econ Lab

About the Foundation

AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more. But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.

These are the two dimensions of what we’re building the Foundation to do. We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient as AI advances. Over the next year, as we quickly ramp up, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs, including early investments toward our previously announced $25 billion commitment to curing diseases and AI resilience.

About the Team

The OpenAI Foundation advances OpenAI’s mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Foundation focuses on four key programs: AI Resilience, Health & Curing Diseases, AI for Civil Society, and the Econ Lab. AI Resilience helps society absorb, adapt to, and benefit from increasingly capable AI systems, with work across biosecurity, model safety, cybersecurity, children and youth, and the future of the economy. The team is small and fast-moving, requiring high judgment, discretion, and operational excellence to manage multiple workstreams, candidates, advisors, grantees, and special projects.

About the Role

The OpenAI Foundation is committing an initial $250M to grants, partnerships, and direct work aimed at building secure and abundant economic futures. The Econ Lab exists to explore the economics of transformative AI—what happens if AI systems reach or exceed human-level capability on most economically valuable work. The standard economic toolkit may not suffice, so the lab runs a portfolio of bets: field-building among AGI-serious economic thinkers, speculative infrastructure like world-simulators, new economic frameworks, and other high-impact initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Define the lab's operating thesis: how to discover what the economics of transformative AI means and what policies might be useful.
• Build and own the portfolio: convert proposals and inbound interest into a small number of fundable, high-impact bets.
• Hire a small team of complementary thinkers (e.g., a grounded real-world economist, a growth or theory economist, and a leader in gradual disempowerment).
• Decide the right vehicle for each pilot/experiment: internal hire, grant, fellowship, advisor relationship, or externally commissioned research.
• Run the cadence that keeps independently-run bets connected—lab meetings, portfolio reviews, peer critique—so lessons from one bet inform others.
• Own the relationship with the field: engage economists, policy entrepreneurs, and institution builders, identifying collaborators, grantees, or hires.
• Create decision artifacts to build leadership trust in the portfolio without requiring review of every proposal.

Requirements

• An economics or policy background grounded in real-world experience (government, industry, or markets), not just academia.
• Ability to distinguish compelling-sounding proposals from truly good ones, and comfort saying no to smart, credentialed people.
• Comfort holding multiple unrelated bets simultaneously without needing them to resolve into a single tidy theory.
• Ability to communicate this work clearly to both AGI-focused audiences and traditional economists.
• Experience navigating politically sensitive or heavily scrutinized work.

Pay

The annual base salary range for this role is $300,000 to $600,000 USD. Actual base salary will be determined based on job-related factors, including the candidate’s relevant experience, skills, expertise, the scope of the role, and work location. This range does not include benefits or other compensation for which the role may be eligible.