Head of Technical Success, Government

Details

The OpenAI for Government team partners with federal, state, local, defense, national security, and international public-sector organizations to securely and responsibly adopt frontier AI, strengthen public services, and deliver meaningful mission impact.

The Head of Government Technical Success will oversee technical functions across the government customer lifecycle, including pre-sales engagement, prototype-to-production delivery, post-sales adoption, and value realization. The role combines organizational leadership, technical judgment, executive customer engagement, operating rigor, and product influence.

Responsibilities

• Set and refine the strategy, operating model, and priorities for Government Technical Success.
• Build and lead a technical success organization, including hiring, organizational design, manager development, and career growth.
• Create a seamless technical journey covering discovery, technical qualification, architecture, prototyping, production deployment, enablement, adoption, and ongoing value realization.
• Partner with Government Sales and account leaders on technical strategy, account planning, resource allocation, and engagement models.
• Serve as a technical executive sponsor for strategic government and partner relationships, building trust with mission leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, technical teams, and other stakeholders.
• Guide teams through government deployment requirements involving security, privacy, identity, data handling, governance, accessibility, integration, compliance, procurement, accreditation, and change management.
• Help customers evaluate, configure, integrate, deploy, and adopt OpenAI products, including ChatGPT Enterprise, Codex, the OpenAI API, and emerging capabilities.
• Establish measures of technical success, including technical qualification, deployment velocity and quality, production use, activation and sustained adoption, account health, renewal and expansion, customer satisfaction, and mission outcomes.
• Scale impact through playbooks, reference architectures, demos, prototypes, workshops, training, community resources, implementation patterns, and partner enablement.
• Develop operating partnerships with systems integrators, cloud and technology partners, and implementation teams.
• Represent government customers by communicating field patterns, use cases, blockers, product gaps, and emerging requirements to Product, Engineering, Research, Security, and Policy teams.
• Anticipate customer and market challenges, intervene in critical engagements, and bring clarity to ambiguous or high-stakes situations.
• Champion a customer-first and mission-first culture focused on safety, responsibility, public trust, and long-term stewardship.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience with public-sector customers.
• Strong record of building and leading multidisciplinary, technical, customer-facing organizations across the full customer lifecycle, including developing and leading managers.
• Experience leading leaders and high-performing technical teams through rapid growth, ambiguity, and organizational change.
• Deep technical acumen in AI and platform technologies, including model behavior and limitations, APIs and SDKs, agentic systems, retrieval and evaluation patterns, enterprise architecture, identity, data controls, security, cloud integration, reliability, observability, and operational readiness.
• Significant experience serving government or similarly complex regulated customers, with an understanding of mission objectives, security and compliance, procurement, implementation partners, workforce adoption, and public accountability.
• Experience serving international government customers or leading international teams, including understanding of varying regulatory, procurement, security, data sovereignty, policy, and delivery requirements.
• Experience leading complex AI, machine learning, or enterprise platform implementations from discovery through stable production and scaled adoption.
• Ability to translate complex technical concepts, tradeoffs, and strategies into clear decisions for executive, technical, operational, policy, and non-technical audiences.
• Exceptional executive communication and relationship-building skills.
• Ability to use data and field evidence to evaluate organizational effectiveness, customer health, resource allocation, and technical success.
• Ability to collaborate across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, Legal, Policy, and partner organizations.
• High ownership, strong judgment, and willingness to dive into details when needed.
• Commitment to safe and responsible AI development and deployment.

Nice to Have

• Leadership experience across multiple public-sector segments, such as federal civilian, defense and national security, state and local, or international government.
• Experience in the AI industry or leading technical success for an enterprise platform product.
• Experience serving as the technical executive sponsor and escalation authority for strategic accounts.
• Experience building partner-led delivery models with systems integrators, cloud providers, or implementation partners.
• Existing U.S. security clearance; clearance is not required but is strongly preferred.

Benefits

• Base salary of $374,000–$450,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax FSA and commuter accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, and office closures.
• 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.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to reasonable accommodations and the safe, responsible development and deployment of AI.