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OpenAI's Government team brings frontier AI to public institutions. The Energy & Science pod supports the Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. national laboratories, NASA, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), helping these institutions apply frontier AI to scientific research, engineering, and mission operations.
As Strategic Delivery Lead, you will shape and deliver high-impact AI engagements across DOE headquarters and the U.S. national laboratory ecosystem. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the leader of Federal Civilian and State & Local Government, working alongside the pod's Account Director and Applied AI Architect.
You will own delivery coordination, adoption, and customer outcomes (without an individual sales quota). You will lead execution across customer and OpenAI workstreams: define scope, milestones, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and success measures; surface risks; resolve blockers; and communicate progress to researchers, lab directors, and DOE leadership. You are accountable for agreed delivery commitments and customer acceptance.
Key responsibilities include:
- Build trusted relationships with DOE leadership, lab directors, research leaders, and technical teams to identify priorities and turn senior alignment into actionable engagements.
- Own delivery plans for assigned DOE and national lab engagements with clear milestones, accountable owners, customer acceptance criteria, and measurable scientific or operational outcomes.
- Translate research and mission needs into requirements and decisions that engineers, researchers, and senior leaders can act on; communicate progress, limitations, risks, and dependencies clearly.
- Connect national lab researchers with OpenAI Research, Product, and Engineering teams to assess promising scientific applications and move feasible opportunities into scoped, supported projects.
- Coordinate the Applied AI Architect, specialist engineers, and customer technical teams on architecture, data access, evaluation, integration, and deployment requirements.
- Build sustained adoption through practical enablement, user feedback, workflow support, and repeatable playbooks applicable across labs and science agencies.
- Lead executive reviews and focused workshops in Washington and at customer sites, bringing decision-makers and technical experts together to resolve issues and advance delivery.
- Identify security, data, infrastructure, contractual, and resourcing risks early; work with accountable teams to resolve them and escalate decisions promptly.
- Prioritize across a small, matrixed team, make clear trade-offs, and maintain momentum as customer needs and model capabilities evolve.
- Coordinate with the Account Director, policy colleagues, and partners on broader DOE and science engagement while keeping delivery commitments aligned with available resources and approved capabilities.
The role is based in Washington, DC, with domestic travel for high-value customer engagements, workshops, and delivery milestones.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 10+ years of experience leading complex technical programs, customer delivery, or transformation initiatives, including substantial work with DOE, U.S. national labs, or comparable federal science institutions.
- Ability to meet customer-specific access requirements. An active DOE Q and/or U.S. Government TS/SCI clearance is preferred for engagements involving national security missions.
- Willingness to travel domestically when an in-person engagement materially advances customer priorities, relationships, or delivery; ability to use Washington-based engagement and remote collaboration effectively.
- Understanding of DOE headquarters, the national lab ecosystem, and how government sponsors, lab management, researchers, and technical teams make decisions and deliver work.
- Experience leading complex AI/ML, enterprise software, API, cloud, scientific computing, or digital transformation engagements through implementation and sustained adoption.
- Executive presence and a record of influencing senior government and laboratory leaders, while remaining personally accountable for follow-through with working teams.
- Ability to translate scientific and mission goals into practical execution plans, acceptance criteria, and measures such as workflow adoption, researcher productivity, output quality, and time to a validated result.
- Sufficient technical fluency to evaluate AI use cases, challenge assumptions, and work credibly with architects and researchers on data integration, model evaluation, and deployment trade-offs.
- Curiosity about frontier AI and active experimentation with the technology to understand its capabilities, limitations, and applications to scientific work.
- Ability to build durable partnerships across scientists, engineers, security teams, program owners, and executives; thriving in ambiguity and taking initiative in a fast-moving environment.
- Judgment to distinguish a promising demonstration from a validated result, and commitment to helping customers use AI responsibly with appropriate data protection, human review, provenance, reproducibility, and scientific validation.
- Valuable: existing relationships across DOE and the national labs, experience with NNSA, and familiarity with NASA or NSF.
