OpenAI

Support Vendor Manager

OpenAI$120K — $145K *
Business Services
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years in vendor/BPO operations management or partner performance leadership
  • Proven ability to manage vendor governance, including SLA/KPI design and escalation paths
  • Awareness of workforce planning approaches and capacity models
  • Strong analytical skills and comfort with data
  • Familiarity with support tooling and operational systems
  • Exposure to WFM platforms and translating operational needs into requirements
  • Strong communication skills and executive presence

Responsibilities

  • Own day-to-day oversight and relationship health for multiple support vendors
  • Define and manage SLA/KPI performance expectations and drive turnarounds
  • Serve as the primary escalation point for vendor issues, ensuring operational controls
  • Partner on contracts and ensure governance mechanisms produce measurable outcomes
  • Establish the Workforce Management approach for internal and BPO teams
  • Produce clear operational reporting on vendor health and scaling constraints

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work in a fast-paced, innovative environment
  • Collaboration with diverse teams across different functions
  • Involvement in shaping scalable operations in a rapidly growing company
  • Exposure to cutting-edge AI technologies and methodologies
  • Commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace
Full Job Description
About the Role

As a Support Vendor Manager, you will own the health, performance, and long-term scalability of multiple support partner and vendor relationships. This is a vendor leadership role first and foremost: you will drive commercial and operational accountability (SLAs, QBRs, escalation paths, remediation plans), while also building the operating model that enables support to scale without linear headcount growth.

A core component of this role (approximately 25-30%) is establishing how we do Workforce Management (WFM) across both internal teams and external BPO partners. This is not an intraday scheduling or WFM analyst role. Instead, you will define the frameworks, standards, and systems for forecasting, capacity planning, staffing strategy, and performance-to-plan-then partner with Operations, Data, Systems/Tooling, and vendor leaders to implement and run them.

You'll collaborate closely with User Operations teams (e.g., Trust & Safety, Fraud & Risk), Systems/Tooling, Data partners, and Product/PM stakeholders as we launch new workflow and launch and scale new programs.

You'll be responsible for:
  • End-to-end vendor leadership: Own day-to-day oversight, relationship health, and executive-level accountability for multiple support vendors/BPOs.
  • Performance management & remediation: Define and manage SLA/KPI performance expectations, run WBRs/QBRs, identify performance gaps, and drive structured turnaround plans with clear owners and timelines.
  • Escalation and risk management: Serve as the primary escalation point for vendor issues, including incident response, surge events, quality regressions, and continuity risks; ensure vendors have strong operational controls and playbooks.
  • Commercial and operational governance: Partner on contract levers, staffing commitments, service scope changes, and operational cadences; ensure governance mechanisms produce measurable outcomes.
  • Workforce Management (WFM) operating model design (25 - 30%):
    • Establish the WFM approach across internal and BPO teams (forecasting, capacity planning, staffing assumptions, coverage standards).
    • Stand up a consistent planning cadence tied to business drivers (weekly/monthly/quarterly) and ensure partners operate to it.
  • Operational reporting and executive narratives: Produce clear, decision-ready reporting on vendor health, capacity risk, and scaling constraints; translate operational signals into recommendations for leadership.
We're looking for someone with:
  • 5+ years in vendor/BPO operations management, support operations, or partner performance leadership in a scaled environment.
  • Proven ability to run vendor governance: QBRs, SLA/KPI design, escalation paths, remediation plans, and cross-functional stakeholder management.
  • Awareness of and some experience with workforce planning approaches-e.g., forecasting frameworks, capacity models, staffing strategies, and performance-to-plan systems. across global, multi-site support operations.
  • Strong analytical and operational rigor: comfort working with data to define inputs/assumptions, evaluate tradeoffs, and drive outcomes (you do not need to be a data scientist, but you must be fluent).
  • Familiarity with support tooling and operational systems (e.g., Salesforce Service Cloud or similar), and comfort partnering with Systems/Tooling to implement scalable processes.
  • Exposure to WFM platforms and concepts (e.g., NICE, Assembled, Calabrio, Playvox, etc.)-with an emphasis on translating operational needs into platform requirements and governance.
  • Strong communication skills and executive presence: ability to align diverse stakeholders, negotiate priorities, and drive accountability across internal teams and external partners.
  • Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where you're expected to build the structure, not just maintain the inherited ones.


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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