How OpenAI’s engineering org is reshaping teams, roles and workflows w/ Sulman Choudhry #250
From The Engineering Leadership Podcast by The Engineering Leadership Community (ELC)
March 10, 2026 · 44 min
About this episode
Sulman Choudhry discusses how OpenAI's engineering organization is evolving team structures and workflows.
In this episode, recorded live at the OpenAI studio, Sulman Choudhry (Head of ChatGPT @ OpenAI) pulls back the curtain on how they structure engineering teams! We talk about shifting from silos to fluid mission-driven teams, vertical vs. horizontal teams, maximizing cross-functional collaboration between research, engineering, product and design. Plus we cover “directly responsible individuals” for high accountability, managers as systems designers, scaling decision-making to prevent leadership from becoming bottlenecks, frameworks for mentoring junior engineers, why “problem framing” is the most critical skill, and how managers can stay close to problems and maintain technical intuition.
People in this episode
Guest: Sulman Choudhry
Topics covered
- engineering teams
- cross-functional collaboration
- accountability
- mentoring
- decision-making
- problem framing
Keywords
- OpenAI
- engineering
- teams
- collaboration
- accountability
- mentoring
- decision-making
- problem framing
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: OpenAI
Products: ChatGPT
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