How Many People Work At OpenAI? (2025)

Introduction

OpenAI, Inc. is an AI company based in San Francisco, California. It started on December 8, 2015, and focuses on building advanced artificial intelligence tools. Behind its innovative products is a growing team of engineers, researchers, and safety experts. People around the world are not only interested in OpenAI’s advanced technology but also in how the company treats its employees.

OpenAI is known for encouraging teamwork, taking responsibility, and thinking about safety in the long run. As more people get excited about artificial intelligence, they also want to know more about the employees who are helping to shape its future.

How many people work at OpenAI?

• The SEO.ai report states that by September 2024, OpenAI had 3,531 employees, which is a big jump compared to just 770 people working there in November 2023.
• The AnswerIQ.com website shows that as of May 2025, OpenAI has over 4400 employees.

OpenAI Employee counts from 2025 to 2024 are mentioned below:

OpenAI Employment Statistics

• According to SQ Magazine, in 2025, around 32% of OpenAI employees worked in research or technical development roles.
• OpenAI hired top talent from major tech firms like Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Apple, and Meta.
• The company’s offices in New York and London each had over 300 team members.
• On average, engineers at OpenAI earned over USD 710,000 per year in total compensation.
• The company also supported 78 young researchers through its Fellowship programs in 2025.
• OpenAI’s employee satisfaction remained high, with an average score of 4.7 out of 5.
• About 44% of the staff identified as women or non-binary.
• In early 2025, OpenAI opened an AI safety campus and received over 400,000 job applications worldwide.

Who are The Founders of OpenAI?

(Source: google.com)

• Sam Altman (born April 22, 1985) – American entrepreneur and investor; CEO of OpenAI since 2019 and former president of Y Combinator.
• Elon Musk (June 28, 1971) – Business magnate behind Tesla, SpaceX, and X; co-founded OpenAI but left its board in 2018.
• Ilya Sutskever (December 8, 1986) – Israeli-Canadian machine learning expert; co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI.
• Greg Brockman (November 29, 1987) – Software engineer and investor; co-founder and current president of OpenAI.
• John Schulman (1987/1988) – AI researcher; co-founder and known for reinforcement learning breakthroughs.
• Andrej Karpathy (October 23, 1986) – Deep learning and vision expert; co-founder, also known for leading AI at Tesla.
• Wojciech Zaremba (November 30, 1988) – Polish computer scientist and OpenAI co-founder since 2016.
• Trevor Blackwell (November 4, 1969) – Roboticist and entrepreneur; known for his Y Combinator role and OpenAI support.
• Vicki Cheung – Co-founder and early engineer who helped build OpenAI’s technical infrastructure.
• Pamela Vagata – Co-founder and tech investor; now leads early-stage AI venture firm Pebblebed.
• Diederik P. Kingma – OpenAI researcher, best known for work on deep generative models.

Who are the Key People Involved with OpenAI?

• As of 2025, OpenAI is led by a team of key executives, where Bret Taylor serves as Chairman, guiding strategic oversight.
• Sam Altman is the Chief Executive Officer, driving the company’s vision.
• Greg Brockman, as President, oversees technical operations and scaling.
• Sarah Friar, the Chief Financial Officer, manages financial strategy and investor relations to support OpenAI’s global growth.

How Many People Work in Each Major Department at OpenAI?

(Reference: unifygtm.com)

• As of 2025, the Engineering department is the largest organization at OpenAI, with almost 1,480 employees, accounting for 56%.
• The employee count of the next three top departments of OpenAI is Business Management (233), Marketing and Product (225), and Human Resources (212), holding a share of 9%, 8%, and 8% respectively.
• Furthermore, other employees are broken down by department, followed by Finance and Administration: 128 (5%), Sales and Support: 107 (4%), Operations: 91 (3%), Information Technology: 68, Legal: 64, and others: 51 (2%).

How Many OpenAI Employees Work in Different Regions?

• In 2025, OpenAI will have employees working across six continents.
• The highest number, around 5,000 people, work in North America.
• In Europe, there are about 827 employees, and in Asia, there are close to 800 team members.
• Around 159 people work for OpenAI in South America, while Africa has a similar count with 156 employees.
• The smallest group is in Oceania, where 64 people are part of the company’s workforce.

Where Are Most of OpenAI’s Employees Located?

• As of 2025, nearly half of OpenAI’s team, around 1,198 employees, work out of its main headquarters in San Francisco, according to Unify report analysis.
• The largest number of employees is based in New York, NY, with 174 people, followed by London, UK, with 84 staff members.
• In the Seattle, WA office, 75 employees are currently working, while Los Angeles, CA has a team of 30 employees.
• The company also maintains smaller offices in Austin, TX (21 employees), Washington, DC (19 employees), Dublin, Ireland (15 employees), and Singapore (13 employees).
• In addition to these, around 1,030 employees are spread across other global locations.

Which positions do people work in at OpenAI?

• The SEO.ai report also states that around 1,199 employees at OpenAI work in engineering roles, which makes up 33.9% of the entire team.
• Meanwhile, 474 people are part of the operational team, which is 13.4% of the workforce, while 346 employees focus on business development, accounting for 9.8% of all workers.

Besides, several other employees in different positions are mentioned in the table below:

What Educational Backgrounds Do OpenAI Employees Have?

• In recent years, almost 800 OpenAI employees studied Computer Science, holding a share of 35.6%.
• Meanwhile, the number of OpenAI employees in the next four educational backgrounds is Computational Science: 623 (27.7%), Economics: 144 (6.4%), Mathematics: 116 (5.2%), and Political Science and Government: 107 (4.8%).

Furthermore, the table below states that OpenAI employees came from different educational backgrounds:

Company Size Distribution of OpenAI Tool Users

(Reference: enlyft.com)

• The chart above shows that OpenAI tools are most used by companies with 10 to 50 employees (1,415), followed closely by those with 50 to 200 employees (1,275).
• Even micro businesses with 1 to 10 employees (847) and large enterprises with over 10,000 employees (908) are actively using OpenAI tools.
• Moderate adoption is seen in companies with 1,000 to 5,000 employees (865), while those with 500 to 1,000 (442) and 5,000 to 10,000 (376) employees show lower usage.

What is OpenAI’s Employee Salary Structure? (30/07/2025)

• As of 2025, the Levels. fyi report further shows that at OpenAI, yearly pay starts at around USD 135,232 for a sales role in the UK and can go up to USD 1,268,042 for a software engineer in the U.S.

OpenAI employees’ yearly salary structure in different positions is mentioned below:

What is the Salary Structure of OpenAI’s remote jobs?

Which companies are using OpenAI?

Where did OpenAI’s Employees Study?

• OpenAI has hired 192 people from Stanford University (13%), 167 from the University of California, Berkeley (11.3%), and 107 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (7.2%).
• Carnegie Mellon University has the most, with 89 people, making up 6.0% of the team, while Harvard University follows with 71 employees (4.8%), and UCLA comes next with 62 (4.2%).
• The University of Southern California follows the number of employees and employee shares who graduated from other universities: 46 (3.1%), University of Washington: 42 (2.8%), New York University: 41 (2.8%), University of Oxford: 40 (2.7%), Caltech: 38 (2.6%), Yale University: 36 (2.4%), Princeton University: 34 (2.3%), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign:33 (2.2%), and Columbia University: 32 (2.2%).

Conclusion

After finishing the article, it is clear that OpenAI’s team is made up of skilled people, with a focus on diversity and high employee involvement. The company is growing and has teams working in different areas, with a strong focus on safety, advanced research, and new ideas.

Most employees are happy with their jobs, especially because of the meaningful work and strong leadership. Still, OpenAI can do more to improve diversity. As it grows worldwide, its focus on people and ethical AI will help it stay a leader in the field.

Joseph D'Souza

Joseph D'Souza founded ElectroIQ in 2010 as a personal project to share his insights and experiences with tech gadgets. Over time, it has grown into a well-regarded tech blog, known for its in-depth technology trends, smartphone reviews and app-related statistics.

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