Senior Counsel, Employment (EMEA)

About the Team

OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation.

About the Role

We’re expanding our world-class Employment Legal team and are seeking EMEA Employment Counsel to provide strategic employment advice and counseling across the EMEA region, supporting rapid workforce growth and day-to-day people decisions. This role serves as a trusted advisor to senior leaders and cross-functional partners across Legal, People, Communications, and Global Affairs, guiding complex, multi-jurisdictional employment issues, proactively managing risk, and helping shape scalable, compliant employment practices aligned with the company’s mission and workforce strategy. This role reports to our Associate General Counsel, Employment.

This role is based in Dublin, Ireland. 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:

• Provide strategic employment law advice and counseling across the EMEA region, supporting rapid workforce growth and day-to-day people decisions.

• Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leaders and cross-functional partners, including Legal, People, Communications, and Global Affairs.

• Advise on and manage works council, collective consultation, and employee representative matters across EMEA, including restructurings, reorganizations, and other workforce changes.

• Guide complex, multi-jurisdictional employment issues, delivering practical legal advice that enables thoughtful and compliant business outcomes.

• Proactively identify, assess, and manage employment-related legal and regulatory risks across EMEA.

• Help design, scale, and operationalize compliant employment practices, policies, and frameworks aligned with the company’s growth strategy.

• Partner closely with global employment legal colleagues to ensure consistency of approach while respecting local law requirements.

• Manage and coordinate external counsel across EMEA, as needed, to support specialized local advice and execution.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of combined EMEA employment legal experience at fast-paced technology companies and/or law firms.

• Have the ability to function effectively in a complex, multinational company.

• Have extensive expertise in European employment laws and practices and advising on complex, cross-border employment issues. Experience advising on mergers & acquisitions, works councils, unions, and TUPE preferred.

• Have strong expertise on employment law aspects of global growth, and ensuring compliant market entry and workforce integration across EMEA jurisdictions.

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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