The posting
Location: Japan (Tokyo)
Type: Contractor (12 months to start)
Hours: 40 hours/week
Role Summary:
We’re looking for a contractor based in Japan to support the development and growth of OpenAI’s student community efforts in Japan and Korea.
This role will focus on building strong relationships with students and campus communities, supporting locally relevant community activations, surfacing meaningful student stories and insights, and helping establish the foundations for sustained student engagement over time.
About the Team
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.
The Community team focuses on finding exceptional power users of our tools and turning real usage into stories and signals that shape both product direction and how the world understands OpenAI. We do that by learning directly from users, then working together to package up insights and use cases into formats that can travel: playbooks, webpages, launch assets, event series and clear “here’s how people actually use this” guidance.
About the Role ChatGPT and OpenAI’s broader tools can help students learn, create, build and solve problems in new ways. But for many, discovering meaningful ways to use AI can still feel like navigating a black box without an instruction manual.
The OpenAI community exists to bridge that gap by working directly with the people using our technology every day.
Our role sits across three core areas:
- Build direct relationships and channels with student leaders and their communities
- Amplify how these cohorts are actually using AI, enabling peer-to-peer learning and accelerating adoption through real examples
- Channel insights and feedback from these communities into our product and research teams
Our current student engagements serve as a key entry point for building long-term relationships with students and priority campuses—helping us identify emerging power users and support growing communities through authentic, student-led engagement.
The goal is for every participant to leave not only with an “I wonder if…,” but with the confidence to build with AI—and a community to learn alongside.
This role will report to the Community Lead, APAC and work closely with cross-functional stakeholders and our external agency partner to support the growth of OpenAI’s student community efforts primarily in Japan,and selected engagement efforts in Korea.
In this role, you will:
- Support the development and growth of OpenAI’s student community efforts in Japan, with opportunities to support relevant engagement efforts in Korea
- Identify, recruit, and onboard students to participate in our global OpenAI Student Collective program
- Build partnerships with student clubs and campus communities to host Labs
- Build and maintain strong relationships with students, hosts, and campus partners
- Coordinate communications, scheduling, logistics, and event execution; resolve issues and remove blockers
- Represent OpenAI on Campus
- Develop and maintain dashboards and systems to track events, performance, and program scale - including student participation and event engagement.
- Collaborate cross-functionally with internal teams to ensure alignment and follow-through.
- Source, review, and curate stories and use cases across events and online communities
- Publish progress updates and monthly recaps, highlighting key insights, risks, and opportunities
- Collaborate with the Community team to improve, maintain community resources, including guides, templates and checklists.
Qualification
Must have:
- 5 years experience building, managing or growing communities, ideally student or campus-based communities.
- Excellent execution skills, with the ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
- Ability to manage multiple workstreams at once, from onboarding and event coordination to story capture and reporting..
- Experience coordinating across multiple stakeholders and driving follow-through.
- Strong communication skills and the ability to build trust quickly with students, partners and internal teams.
- Comfort with tools like Slack, Google Docs / Sheets, Airtable or similar workflow systems.
- Willingness to travel for student community activations across Japan, and occasionally Korea where relevant
- Japanese language proficiency
Bonus:
- Active participation in tech and AI communities, with a strong understanding of how these ecosystems operate beyond top-line metrics
- Strong interest in AI and familiarity with how the space is evolving, including emerging product and agent experiences.
- Experience working with agencies and external partners.
- Strong relationships with student communities, clubs or universities in Japan and Korea
- Korean language proficiency
