OpenAI is under “unprecedented pressure to grow” as it races to scale in the era of artificial general intelligence, said Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, the tech giant’s newly appointed head of recruiting.
“If we were a rocket (wait, we’re one), we’d be at MaxQ — maximum dynamic pressure,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday announcing his new role. “Recruiting has never been more important.”
Candela joined OpenAI in 2024 as head of preparedness, where he worked on building safer AI systems. He holds a Ph.D. in machine learning and has spent decades in the field, including more than nine years at Facebook, where he led the company’s machine learning group and later its responsible AI efforts.
His new position comes at a time when OpenAI — and the broader AI sector — is rethinking what hiring looks like in a world shaped by the very technologies it’s building. The company has grown almost tenfold over the past two and a half years, Candela said.
“The world is looking to us to learn how to grow and how to work together in an AGI era,” he added. “How should we use AGI for recruiting? Whom should we hire in a post-AGI world?”
The company lists 330 open jobs, from a sales gig in Korea to postings for lawyers in San Francisco.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The race for AI talent
Candela’s comments come as OpenAI tries to stay ahead in the AI talent war.
In May, OpenAI announced it was buying an AI hardware startup from Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief, for nearly $6.5 billion. Ive’s startup, IO, is set to work with OpenAI’s research, engineering, and product teams.
Sam Altman also said in the same month that he had hired Fidji Simo, Instacart’s chair and CEO, as his new CEO of applications. “I cannot imagine a better new team member to help us scale the next 10x (or 100x, let’s see),” Altman wrote in a post on X.
The hiring builds on last June’s appointments of Sarah Friar, the former CEO of Nextdoor, as chief financial officer, and Kevin Weil, a former Meta and Twitter exec, as chief product officer.
OpenAI is not alone in chasing top AI talent.
Just last week, Meta announced a nearly $15 billion investment in data company Scale AI — and brought over its CEO Alexandr Wang to join the tech giant’s AI push. Meta now owns a 49% stake in the company, which also counts OpenAI as a major customer.