Dedicated Support Engineer - San Francisco

Details

OpenAI’s User Operations team helps customers adopt AI and delivers an exceptional product experience. The Support Engineering team partners with Engineering, Product, Technical Success, Go-to-Market, and other teams to support strategic Premium Support customers through technical troubleshooting, reliability work, customer context, and clear ownership during critical incidents.

The role focuses on diagnosing complex and ambiguous technical issues using logs, telemetry, reproduction, and systems-level investigation. You will help customers operate more resilient workloads by monitoring integrations, identifying failure patterns and architectural risks, and developing runbooks, automation, monitoring, and preventative improvements.

Responsibilities

• Troubleshoot complex customer issues involving API failures, integration challenges, authentication errors, unexpected product behavior, performance degradation, and production incidents.
• Analyze logs and system behavior, reproduce errors, test hypotheses, isolate failure domains, and identify root causes or provide evidence-backed hypotheses for Engineering.
• Serve as a trusted technical expert and escalation point for strategic Premium Support customers.
• Own customer-specific responses to high-impact incidents, including severity assessment, business-impact analysis, responder coordination, mitigation, resolution, and post-incident follow-through.
• Communicate clearly with customer technical teams, business stakeholders, executives, and internal partners during periods of uncertainty.
• Develop and document detailed knowledge of customer architectures, integrations, dependencies, critical workloads, and operational constraints.
• Partner with Go-to-Market, Technical Success, and account teams to incorporate relevant commercial context into severity, prioritization, and communication while following established support processes.
• Represent Support Engineering in customer meetings, including QBRs, and communicate technical health, risks, blockers, and follow-up actions.
• Monitor customer integrations and support trends to identify emerging risks, recurring failure patterns, and readiness gaps.
• Prepare for launches, migrations, traffic increases, and business events by creating account-specific runbooks, validating escalation paths, coordinating support readiness, and providing heightened monitoring.
• Lead or contribute to incident reviews and postmortems, identify preventative actions, and track corrective work through completion.
• Translate recurring customer issues into evidence-backed feedback for Product and Engineering, focusing on product, integration, deployment reliability, and performance.
• Create scalable improvements such as troubleshooting guides, monitoring, internal tooling, support workflows, and AI-powered automation.
• Help shape the operating model, technical standards, and tooling for Premium Support as the function grows globally.

Requirements

• Significant experience in Support Engineering, Software Engineering, Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Operations, or a similar role involving hands-on diagnosis of complex production issues.
• Expert-level troubleshooting skills and experience resolving ambiguous technical problems across APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
• Experience working with logs, metrics, traces, API requests, authentication flows, and customer-provided code or configurations.
• Experience leading or centrally participating in customer-impacting incidents, including severity assessment, technical coordination, stakeholder communication, root-cause analysis, and post-incident follow-through.
• Ability to write code or scripts to reproduce issues, interrogate systems, automate repetitive work, and improve internal tools. Experience with Python, JavaScript, or similar languages is valuable.
• Ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to engineers, customer technical teams, business stakeholders, and senior leaders.
• Ability to build high-trust relationships with customers and cross-functional partners while maintaining scalable ownership boundaries.
• A preventative mindset focused on identifying patterns, improving systems, and avoiding recurrence.
• Comfort with ambiguity, rapidly changing information, and learning new technologies as needed.
• Humble, team-first approach with strong judgment and enthusiasm for helping customers and colleagues succeed.
• Interest in using OpenAI products, agents, and emerging AI capabilities to transform technical support at scale.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Base salary of $180,000–$260,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.