About the role
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.
About the Role
We are looking for an Applied AI Engineering Manager, Startups, Greenfield to lead and scale our Applied AI Engineering team. Greenfield encompasses two complementary motions: helping early-stage startups reach their first meaningful production deployment and initial scale, and winning high-potential startups through competitive evaluations and migrations. Depending on the team you lead, you will coach engineers towards scalable activation or deep, targeted technical pursuits.
This leader will operate in a high-velocity customer segment where founders, CTOs, and technical teams expect speed, judgment, and hands-on problem-solving. They will balance team leadership, technical depth, customer prioritization, and cross-functional influence across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and broader go-to-market teams.
In this role, you will define how OpenAI supports startup customers at scale: identifying where deep technical engagement can unlock outsized impact, building repeatable deployment mechanisms, and ensuring the team can serve a broad and dynamic customer base without losing quality or strategic focus.
In this role, you will
- Craft and continuously refine the strategic vision and operating model for the Startups Applied AI Engineering team, aligning it with OpenAI’s broader company objectives and the evolving needs of high-growth startup customers.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of high-performing technical ICs supporting startup customers across AI-native, developer-led, and product-led companies.
- Help startups move from early experimentation to production usage by identifying technical blockers, advising on architecture, and driving practical paths to deployment. Lead technical strategy for priority competitive pursuits, coaching engineers on workload discovery, representative evaluations, quality and cost optimisation, and migration planning.
- Partner closely with Sales to determine where technical engagement can accelerate adoption, production usage, and long-term account growth.