HR Business Partner, EMEA

About the Team

OpenAI’s People team aims to hire, engage, and retain world-class talent to safely build and deploy universally beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The HR team, a vital subset of the People team, supports a diverse group of scientists, engineers, and business professionals, with expertise spanning employee relations, immigration, compensation and benefits, learning and development, project management, and more.

About the Role

We’re seeking an HR Business Partner to support our growing teams across EMEA, with a particular focus on France. This role will help build scalable, locally compliant people practices and support strong employee relations as we grow.

You will partner closely with regional People leadership, Legal, Employee Relations, and other People COEs to strengthen our approach to employee relations and employee representation in France. This will include building practical governance, manager practices, and operating processes that are compliant and sustainable as we scale.

Beyond France, this role will serve as a trusted HR partner to managers and teams across EMEA. You will combine strong operational execution with thoughtful business judgment to support performance, organizational health, employee relations, and disciplined people practices at scale.

This role reports into the International HRBP Lead, who owns regional organizational design and workforce planning. You will operate as a key regional execution partner to them, translating strategic direction into consistent delivery, elevating manager capability, and proactively surfacing people risks and themes.

If you're joining us in person, we offer relocation support and follow a hybrid schedule: three days a week in the office, with the option to work from home on Thursdays and Fridays. Our offices are designed for focus and connection, with spaces for both individual work and collaboration.

Your Responsibilities

• Lead employee-representative work in France: Partner with Legal, Employee Relations, People Operations, and local stakeholders to own and deliver CSE-related processes, including elections, consultations, employee communications, documentation, governance, and effective ongoing operating rhythms.

• Build sustainable employee relations processes: Help establish clear processes for engaging with employee representatives, preparing for required information and consultation processes, maintaining appropriate documentation, and coordinating inputs from relevant business and People stakeholders.

• Support managers operating in the French employee relations environment: Equip managers and leaders with practical guidance on working effectively within French employment and employee-representation frameworks, escalating complex matters to Legal or specialist teams as appropriate.

• Drive strong day-to-day HR execution: Partner with managers across EMEA to support performance management cycles, feedback conversations, organizational changes, and employee relations matters with consistency and care.

• Be the go-to partner for frontline managers: Provide practical, timely guidance on team health, coaching conversations, policy interpretation, performance management, and manager enablement.

• Support and operationalize People programs: Help implement and maintain performance, engagement, retention, and employee experience initiatives, ensuring processes are clear, scalable, and well executed across different EMEA jurisdictions.

• Triage and resolve employee relations issues: Identify issues early, assess risk, recommend appropriate actions, and partner with Employee Relations, Legal, and other COEs on complex or sensitive matters.

• Maintain operational rigor: Track employee relations themes, maintain complete and accurate documentation, coordinate recurring processes, and ensure actions and commitments are followed through.

• Collaborate cross-functionally: Work closely with HRBPs, Legal, Employee Relations, People Operations, Total Rewards, and other COEs to provide a consistent and high-quality employee experience across EMEA.

We’re Seeking

• Strong HR foundation: Approximately 8+ years of HR experience, including meaningful experience partnering directly with managers in fast-paced, high-growth, or complex international environments as a Senior HR Generalist or HR Business Partner.

• French employee relations experience: Practical experience working with French employment practices and employee representative bodies. Direct experience establishing, supporting, or working closely with a CSE, works council, or comparable employee representative structure is highly valued.

• Experience with employee representative processes: Familiarity with employee elections, consultation processes, employee representative communications, and the governance and documentation associated with formal employee representation.

• Execution-oriented partnership: Comfortable owning detailed, time-sensitive workstreams and coordinating across multiple stakeholders while maintaining sound judgment and strong follow-through.

• Strong project management: Able to take complex, multi-stage employee-representative processes and translate them into clear milestones, owners, dependencies, communications, and operating processes.

• Manager coaching capability: Able to guide managers through performance conversations, organizational changes, and employee relations issues with clarity and confidence.

• Operational strength: Brings structure, organization, and discipline to people processes and can build repeatable practices as the organization scales.

• Good judgment under pressure: Balances empathy, employee experience, business needs, and appropriate risk management while handling sensitive matters with discretion.

• High integrity: Trusted, fair, principled, and comfortable operating in an environment where confidentiality and sound judgment are essential.

• Language capability: Professional fluency in French and English is strongly preferred given the role’s responsibility for supporting employee relations and representative processes in France.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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