James Zhang

James Zhang is an Engineering Manager and member of the technical staff at OpenAI, where he focuses on building ChatGPT. Prior to joining the artificial intelligence organization in 2025, he spent eight years in engineering leadership and development roles across Notion and Stripe. During his tenure as an Engineering Manager at Notion from 2023 to 2025, Zhang directed the development of Notion Calendar, formerly Cron. At Stripe between 2020 and 2023, he managed engineering teams responsible for core financial infrastructure products, including Stripe Checkout and Stripe Billing. Earlier in his career, he participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch and co-founded consumer social applications, notably creating Polly, a polling integration for Snapchat that scaled to over 45 million teenage users. His professional background centers on scaling engineering teams and developing high-volume consumer, productivity, and financial software.