Dedicated Support Engineering Lead

Details

OpenAI’s User Operations team supports customers adopting and deploying AI products. Within Premium Support, Dedicated Support Engineers combine deep technical troubleshooting with detailed knowledge of strategic customers’ architectures, critical workloads, and business priorities. They provide proactive reliability work, lead incident response, and use AI-powered support capabilities to help customers operate successfully as their use of OpenAI grows.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy, charter, service model, priorities, and growth plan for Dedicated Support Engineering.
• Build and develop a high-performing global organization by hiring and coaching senior technical talent, developing future leaders, and establishing expectations for technical depth, customer ownership, collaboration, and performance.
• Design the customer engagement model, including customer assignments, account knowledge, operational reviews, critical-event preparation, and responsibilities across Support, Technical Success, Sales, and Engineering.
• Set standards for technical ownership using evidence, reproduction, and systems-level investigation to resolve complex issues.
• Establish proactive reliability practices for assessing customer architectures and dependencies, identifying emerging risks, and preparing for launches, migrations, and traffic growth.
• Lead high-stakes customer situations as a senior escalation point, coordinate responders, communicate with customer executives, and maintain accountability through mitigation, resolution, and follow-through.
• Own delivery quality and sustainable growth through capacity plans, coverage arrangements, and investment proposals.
• Define and measure outcomes including investigation quality, time to mitigation, recurring issue reduction, customer confidence, and proactive risk reduction.
• Influence product and engineering priorities by turning customer investigation patterns into recommendations concerning reliability, observability, supportability, and tooling.
• Make AI and automation foundational to the function by applying OpenAI technology to preserve customer context, accelerate investigations, detect risks, and automate repeatable work. Establish evaluations and human oversight to maintain quality and customer trust.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles, including 6+ years of leadership responsibility for enterprise Support Engineering, Technical Account Management, or a comparable function supporting complex production environments.
• Experience building or materially scaling a dedicated technical customer program, including ownership of its service model, staffing, delivery standards, and outcomes.
• Experience leading senior engineers and developing technical leaders across regions, with a clear approach to hiring, coaching, and performance management.
• Strong technical foundation in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
• Ability to evaluate investigation quality, challenge hypotheses, and guide teams through ambiguous failures.
• Experience maintaining long-term technical relationships with strategic enterprise customers and connecting architecture and workload context to business impact and operational priorities.
• Experience leading high-stakes customer escalations and building trust with engineering teams and executives while communicating uncertainty accurately.
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries, resolve competing priorities, and translate customer evidence into technical and operational changes.
• Sound judgment in balancing customer commitments, service quality, staffing, and the economics of a growing support function.
• Demonstrated improvements through automation or AI, with the ability to distinguish promising experiments from capabilities ready for dependable customer use.
• Ability to establish direction in ambiguity, take accountability for difficult decisions, and build a team that operates with curiosity, humility, and urgency.

Work Arrangement

This role is based in San Francisco, California, with a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is available to new employees.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, charitable donation matching, and wellness stipends may also be provided.