Certification Architect

About the Role

As Certification Architect, you will define the framework, standards, and assessment architecture that make OpenAI certifications a trusted signal of demonstrated capability.

This is a senior hands-on role on the Certification team that will build reusable foundations for a growing portfolio: clear competency standards, defensible assessments, scalable in-product delivery, and evidence of continued competence.

We’re looking for someone who combines deep certification and assessment expertise with the ability to innovate new and meaningful ways to demonstrate practical AI competence. You will work closely with certification specialists, technical subject matter experts, learning product and engineering teams, operations and policy partners, and stakeholders across the go-to-market organization.

The program is early, and you will help shape how people demonstrate capability in ChatGPT and Codex. Success means building standards that are rigorous, usable, and adaptable as AI technology and professional roles evolve.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Own the credential framework and shared competency standards, distinguishing completed learning, demonstrated skills, and formal certification, with clear capability claims and evidence requirements for each.
• Establish reusable assessment standards and guidance for certification pods across job-task analysis, competency models, assessment blueprints, performance tasks, scoring rubrics, and passing standards.
• Own the validation approach and evidence documentation requirements. Partner with pod leaders to validate certification proposals against job relevance, representative task coverage, scoring consistency, fairness, and appropriate interpretation of results.
• Define exam delivery architecture and requirements with product, engineering, operations, and third parties, spanning registration, identity verification, monitoring, permitted assistance, evidence capture, scoring, human review, appeals, customer support, and record management.
• Define expectations for continued competence validation post-assessment.
• Partner with learning, operations, policy, legal, privacy, security, and accessibility teams to align preparation with competencies while protecting assessment integrity and establishing appropriate evidence access, retention, accommodations, and review processes.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 10+ years experience designing and delivering professional technical IT industry certifications or assessments that support credible claims about what people can do.
• Have led design of performance-based assessments for AI, software development, technical architecture, or customer-facing implementation roles.
• Have built credential frameworks, competency models, or shared assessment standards that work across multiple roles or programs.
• Have led job-task analysis, assessment blueprints, performance-based assessment, rubric design, standard setting, and the evidence needed to support valid and fair certification decisions.
• Can translate assessment experience requirements into exam delivery specifications for third parties and learning product teams.
• Have worked closely with certification specialists, psychometricians and subject matter experts to validate assessment and scoring standards and improve assessment quality.
• Communicate complex standards clearly to technical and nontechnical partners, and build alignment across teams without relying on formal authority.
• Enjoy hands-on work, from drafting standards and reviewing assessment designs to resolving practical delivery tradeoffs with a small team.
• Exercise sound judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing rigor, candidate experience, delivery feasibility, and the pace of technology change.
• Care deeply about accessibility, fairness, and the integrity of credentials that individuals and employers rely on.
• Build reusable approaches while recognizing where different roles need distinct competency models, tasks, and evidence.

Additional experience that would be helpful includes

• Validating AI-assisted scoring, model evaluations, or other automated approaches to evaluating human performance.
• Working with secure assessment delivery, identity verification, credential issuance, learner records, or assessment technology providers.
• Developing innovative approaches to recertification, ongoing competence, or assessment of authentic work.
• Building products that serve both individual users and organizations.