Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Startups)

The role

You will lead and scale the Startups Applied AI Engineering team to help high-growth companies move from experimentation to production. You will manage technical ICs, define strategic operating models, and partner with Sales, Product, and Engineering teams.

What you will do

• Craft and refine the strategic vision and operating model for the Startups Applied AI Engineering team.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of high-performing technical ICs.
• Help startups move from early experimentation to production usage.
• Partner with Sales to accelerate adoption and long-term account growth.
• Represent the technical voice of startup customers by synthesizing feedback.
• Translate recurring startup needs into repeatable playbooks and assets.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for priority startup customers.
• Balance urgent customer needs with OpenAI product and platform priorities.
• Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality and customer judgment.
• Partner across GTM teams to improve startup support.

Required qualifications

• Proven experience founding, scaling, or operating within early-stage startups.
• Track record of building and leading technical, customer-facing teams in high-growth or startup-heavy environments.
• Technical depth across APIs, platform products, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, and production deployment.
• Experience creating scalable operating models.
• Comfort working directly with founders, CTOs, and technical executives.
• Ability to translate complex technical and product considerations into clear decisions.
• Commitment to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI.

Nice to have

• Experience in technical leadership roles where you owned both product or customer outcomes and technical execution.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.