Sales Development Leader - Tokyo

The role

You will lead and develop a team of SDRs supporting enterprise business in Japan. You will drive pipeline generation and build outbound and inbound motions for the Japanese market.

What you will do

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of SDRs supporting Large Enterprise, Strategic Accounts, and key industry verticals across Japan
• Drive high-quality pipeline generation through outbound prospecting, inbound qualification, account-based motions, and product-led signals
• Build an SDR motion tailored to the Japanese enterprise market
• Establish strong operational rigor around activity metrics, conversion rates, pipeline quality, and execution consistency
• Partner closely with Account Directors and Japan sales leadership on territory planning and account prioritization
• Help define scalable SDR playbooks across outbound, inbound, ABM, partner-sourced, and product-led motions
• Coach SDRs on executive communication, discovery, account research, and strategic prospecting
• Build a high-performance, collaborative, and low-ego team culture
• Work cross-functionally with Marketing, Partnerships, Solutions Engineering, and Strategy & Operations
• Support the hiring, onboarding, and development of SDR talent

Required qualifications

• 6–10+ years of experience in sales, business development, or GTM roles, with significant experience in the Japanese market
• Experience managing SDRs, BDRs, or business development teams in enterprise SaaS, cloud, platform, or other technology businesses
• Strong understanding of enterprise prospecting, pipeline generation, and outbound strategy in Japan
• Understand how large Japanese enterprises evaluate and adopt new technologies
• Highly operational and data-driven with experience managing metrics, conversion funnels, pipeline performance, and forecasting
• Experience partnering closely with Enterprise Sales teams on strategic account development
• Exceptional coach
• Fluent in Japanese
• Able to operate effectively in English in a global business environment

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They seek to safely deploy AI to the world through their products.