Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives)

About the Team

The Applied AI Engineering team partners closely with customers to help them turn frontier AI capabilities into real products, workflows, and business impact. We act as trusted technical partners across strategy, solution design, architecture, implementation, evaluation, and adoption, working alongside customers to build and scale effective AI applications with OpenAI’s technologies.

The Digital Natives segment serves technology and software companies that are building AI into the core of their products and businesses. These customers are often highly technical, move quickly, and are among the earliest adopters of OpenAI’s newest capabilities. Our Applied AI Engineers work directly with their engineering, product, and technical leadership teams to identify high-impact opportunities, solve complex technical challenges, and bring ambitious AI applications into production.

You’ll Thrive in This Role If You

• Have 8+ years of experience in deeply technical, customer-facing roles such as applied engineering, solutions architecture, deployment engineering, technical consulting, or similar roles.
• Have 2+ years of experience leading technical teams, with a demonstrated ability to hire, develop, mentor, and manage high-performing engineers.
• Have experience building or deploying generative AI, machine learning, developer platforms, or cloud-based software solutions in production environments.
• Bring strong technical depth across APIs, AI/ML systems, application architecture, cloud infrastructure, and modern developer workflows.
• Have hands-on software engineering experience and fluency with programming languages such as Python or JavaScript.
• Are comfortable working directly with highly technical engineering and product teams as well as CTOs and other executive stakeholders.
• Can translate ambiguous customer and business problems into clear technical approaches and guide teams from exploration through implementation and production.
• Demonstrate strong judgment about when to invest deeply in an individual customer challenge versus when to develop a repeatable solution for the broader segment.
• Are an effective communicator who can translate complex technical and business topics across audiences and coach others to do the same.
• Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and are energized by working with customers at the forefront of AI adoption.
• Demonstrate strong ownership, humility, curiosity, and a commitment to helping both customers and teammates succeed.
• Are personally committed to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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