OpenAI

Dedicated Support Engineering Lead

OpenAI$160K — $190K *
Information Technology
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 12+ years in technical customer-facing roles, including 6+ years in leadership roles for enterprise Support Engineering or Technical Account Management.
  • Experience in building or significantly scaling dedicated technical customer programs with clear service models and outcomes.
  • Proven ability to lead senior engineers and develop future technical leaders across different regions.
  • Strong technical background in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.
  • Experience maintaining long-term technical relationships with enterprise customers, aligning architecture context with business needs.
  • Expertise in managing high-stakes customer escalations and building trust with engineering teams and executives.

Responsibilities

  • Set the strategy for Dedicated Support Engineering, defining its charter and growth plan.
  • Build and develop a high-performing global team, including hiring and coaching senior technical talent.
  • Design and implement the customer engagement model for DSEs, ensuring effective knowledge sharing and operational reviews.
  • Set standards for technical ownership and ensure quality investigations of complex issues.
  • Integrate proactive reliability assessment practices into service delivery to mitigate risks during launches and migrations.
  • Lead escalation efforts during critical customer situations, ensuring communication and alignment across teams.
  • Own the delivery quality and growth plans, balancing workload and proactive work as customer portfolios expand.
  • Define meaningful metrics for assessing service quality, customer confidence, and proactive risk management.

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week.
  • Relocation assistance for new employees.
Full Job Description
About the Team

OpenAI's User Operations team shepherds our customers' adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional.We are building the very first post-AGI support team.We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.

Within Premium Support, Dedicated Support Engineers combine deep technical troubleshooting with an enduring understanding of our most strategic customers' architectures, critical workloads, and business priorities. Through proactive reliability work, ownership during incidents, and AI-powered support capabilities, we help customers operate successfully as their use of OpenAI grows.

About the Role

We're looking for a senior leader to build and scale our Dedicated Support Engineering function globally. You will define its strategy, build the team, and establish how we deliver technically rigorous, proactive support for customers running some of the most complex and consequential workloads on OpenAI.

This role combines organizational leadership, technical judgment, and executive customer engagement. You will establish a model in which DSEs develop deep customer context, independently advance difficult investigations, anticipate operational risks, and drive issues through resolution. You will also turn what the team learns into improvements that benefit customers across OpenAI.

You should bring experience building technical organizations that maintain long-term accountability for enterprise customers. Leadership in Technical Account Management, enterprise Support Engineering, or a comparable technical customer function is particularly relevant. Success requires a strong foundation in production troubleshooting and reliability, alongside the ability to build trusted relationships with customer engineering leaders and executives.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role you will...
  • Set the strategy for Dedicated Support Engineering. Define the function's charter, service model, priorities, and growth plan. Translate customer needs and company priorities into clear decisions about where to invest and how to scale.
  • Build and develop a high-performing global organization. Hire and coach senior technical talent, develop future leaders, and establish expectations for technical depth, customer ownership, collaboration, and performance.
  • Design the customer engagement model. Establish how DSEs are assigned to customers, build account knowledge, conduct operational reviews, and prepare for critical events. Define clear responsibilities and handoffs with Support, Technical Success, Sales, and Engineering.
  • Set the standard for technical ownership. Ensure the team uses evidence, reproduction, and systems-level investigation to advance complex issues. Develop the team's judgment on when to continue investigating, mitigate, or engage Engineering, and stay close enough to the work to guide difficult decisions.
  • Build proactive reliability into the service. Establish practices for assessing customer architectures and dependencies, identifying emerging risks, and preparing for launches, migrations, and traffic growth. Ensure incident learnings lead to completed corrective actions.
  • Lead through critical customer situations. Serve as a senior escalation point, align responders across teams, and communicate clearly with customer executives. Maintain accountability for the customer's support experience through mitigation, resolution, and follow-through.
  • Own delivery quality and sustainable growth. Build capacity plans, coverage arrangements, and investment proposals that support service commitments. Balance customer complexity, team workload, and time for proactive work as the customer portfolio grows.
  • Define and measure meaningful outcomes. Establish measures of investigation quality, time to mitigation, recurring issue reduction, customer confidence, and proactive risk reduction. Use these insights to improve the service and guide investment.
  • Influence product and engineering priorities. Turn patterns across customer investigations into evidence-backed recommendations. Build alignment with senior partners on reliability, observability, supportability, and tooling improvements.
  • Make AI and automation foundational to the function. Apply OpenAI's technology to preserve customer context, accelerate investigations, detect risks, and automate repeatable work. Establish evaluations and human oversight so these capabilities improve quality and customer trust.


You might thrive in this role if you...
  • Have 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.
  • Have built or materially scaled a dedicated technical customer program, with ownership of its service model, staffing, delivery standards, and outcomes.
  • Bring experience leading senior engineers and developing technical leaders across regions, with a clear approach to hiring, coaching, and performance.
  • Have a strong technical foundation in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations. You can evaluate investigation quality, challenge hypotheses, and guide teams through ambiguous failures.
  • Have maintained long-term technical relationships with strategic enterprise customers, connecting architecture and workload context to business impact and operational priorities.
  • Have led high-stakes customer escalations and can earn trust with both engineering teams and executives while communicating uncertainty accurately.
  • Can influence senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries, resolve competing priorities, and translate customer evidence into concrete technical and operational changes.
  • Have demonstrated sound judgment in balancing customer commitments, service quality, staffing, and the economics of a growing support function.
  • Have delivered measurable improvements through automation or AI and can distinguish promising experiments from capabilities ready for dependable customer use.
  • Are comfortable establishing direction in ambiguity, taking accountability for difficult decisions, and building a team that operates with curiosity, humility, and urgency.


About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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