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OpenAI's User Operations team is seeking a senior leader to build and scale the Dedicated Support Engineering (DSE) function globally. This role combines organizational leadership, technical judgment, and executive customer engagement to establish how OpenAI delivers technically rigorous, proactive support for customers running complex and mission-critical workloads on OpenAI's products.
You will define the DSE function's strategy, build the team from the ground up, and establish a service model where Dedicated Support Engineers develop deep customer context, independently advance difficult investigations, anticipate operational risks, and drive issues through resolution. The role requires setting organizational direction in ambiguity, building trusted relationships with customer engineering leaders and executives, and turning team learnings into improvements that benefit customers across OpenAI.
Key responsibilities include:
- Setting strategy for the DSE function: charter, service model, priorities, and global growth plan
- Building and developing a high-performing global organization with senior technical talent and future leaders
- Designing the customer engagement model, including DSE assignment, account knowledge development, operational reviews, and critical event preparation
- Setting the standard for technical ownership through evidence-based investigation and systems-level troubleshooting
- Building proactive reliability practices: assessing customer architectures, identifying emerging risks, and ensuring incident learnings lead to corrective actions
- Leading through critical customer situations as a senior escalation point
- Owning delivery quality and sustainable growth through capacity planning and investment proposals
- Defining and measuring meaningful outcomes: investigation quality, time to mitigation, recurring issue reduction, customer confidence, and proactive risk reduction
- Influencing product and engineering priorities based on customer investigation patterns
- Making AI and automation foundational to the function, applying OpenAI's technology to preserve context, accelerate investigations, and detect risks
The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid work model of 3 days in-office per week. OpenAI offers relocation assistance to new employees.
Requirements:
- 12+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles, including 6+ years of leadership responsibility for enterprise Support Engineering, Technical Account Management, or comparable function supporting complex production environments
- Experience building or materially scaling a dedicated technical customer program with ownership of service model, staffing, delivery standards, and outcomes
- Experience leading senior engineers and developing technical leaders across regions with clear hiring, coaching, and performance management approaches
- Strong technical foundation in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations; ability to evaluate investigation quality and guide teams through ambiguous failures
- Long-term technical relationships with strategic enterprise customers, connecting architecture and workload context to business impact
- Track record leading high-stakes customer escalations and earning trust with both engineering teams and executives
- Ability to influence senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries and translate customer evidence into technical and operational changes
- Sound judgment balancing customer commitments, service quality, staffing, and support function economics
- Demonstrated improvements through automation or AI with ability to distinguish promising experiments from production-ready capabilities
- Comfort establishing direction in ambiguity, taking accountability for difficult decisions, and building teams that operate with curiosity, humility, and urgency
