A look inside an engineering team @OpenAI with Dylan Vassallo

Dylan Vassallo is an engineering manager at OpenAI leading the People Innovation Labs team — an eng, product, and design team embedded within the People org, building AI-powered tools for recruiting, HR, internal comms, and the employee experience. In this episode, Dylan talks about what it actually looks like to be an engineering team inside a frontier AI company, how non-engineers are becoming builders, and what the "graduation" process looks like when a prototype needs to become a production system. Links & References OpenAI Codex - Lattice - — performance management platform mentioned Linear - — used for team project tracking Workday - — referenced as system of record

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A look inside an engineering team @OpenAI with Dylan Vassallo is an episode from StaffEng by David Noël-Romas (@davidnoelromas) and Alex Kessinger (@voidfiles).

This episode is 44:43 long.

This episode was published on Apr 10, 2026.

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