Episode

How OpenAI’s engineering org is reshaping teams, roles and workflows w/ Sulman Choudhry #250

Podcast
The Engineering Leadership Podcast
Published
Mar 10, 2026
Duration seconds
2623
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://sfelc.com/podcasts
Audio
https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/afp-942744-injected.calisto.simplecastaudio.com/4d87e711-78c0-43f3-9633-fa05520e07f2/episodes/54b8fd75-e11e-4546-b4ad-a171c2ea609e/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=4d87e711-78c0-43f3-9633-fa05520e07f2&awEpisodeId=54b8fd75-e11e-4546-b4ad-a171c2ea609e&feed=Z8Dl_qAv
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/the-engineering-leadership-podcast-743839/episodes/how-openai-s-engineering-org-is-reshaping-teams-roles-and-workflows-w-sulman-choudhry-250
Markdown
/podcast/the-engineering-leadership-podcast-743839/how-openai-s-engineering-org-is-reshaping-teams-roles-and-workflows-w-sulman-choudhry-250.md

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Summary

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.