Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Startups)

About the Team

The Applied AI Engineering team partners closely with customers to help them move from experimentation to production with OpenAI’s technologies. We act as trusted technical advisors, working across customer strategy, architecture, deployment, and adoption to help organizations realize meaningful impact from frontier AI.

The Startups segment serves fast-moving, high-growth companies that are often building new products, workflows, and businesses directly on top of AI. These customers move quickly, operate with high ambiguity, and expect practical, creative, and technically rigorous partnership.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have proven experience founding, scaling, or operating within early-stage startups, ideally in technical leadership roles where you owned both product or customer outcomes and technical execution.
• Have a strong track record of building and leading technical, customer-facing teams in high-growth, ambiguous, or startup-heavy environments.
• Bring strong technical depth across APIs, platform products, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, and production deployment considerations.
• Have experience creating scalable operating models, not just managing one-off customer escalations.
• Are comfortable working directly with founders, CTOs, technical executives, and highly technical ICs.
• Demonstrate strong judgment about when to go deep for a strategic customer versus when to build repeatable mechanisms for the broader segment.
• Can translate complex technical and product considerations into clear decisions, practical guidance, and customer-facing recommendations.
• Operate with speed, iteration, and pragmatic customer impact without sacrificing quality, safety, or OpenAI’s long-term platform strategy.
• Are personally committed to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI.

Success in this role may look like:

• Increased startup account usage, including tokens, requests, and production workloads.
• A strong cadence of successful customer sprints and production-oriented technical engagements.
• High-quality customer stories, founder and CTO satisfaction, and referenceable startup wins.
• Creation of repeatable startup deployment patterns, starter packs, templates, and reference architectures.
• Strong Product and Research feedback loops informed by startup customer needs and emerging use cases.
• A healthy, high-performing team with strong prioritization, clear operating mechanisms, and the ability to scale coverage across a high-demand segment.

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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