Applied AI Engineering Manager, Startups | Core

The role

You will lead and scale the Startups Applied AI Engineering team to help high-growth companies move from experimentation to production. This role involves managing technical ICs, defining operating models, and partnering with Sales, Product, and Research 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 regarding developer experience and product gaps.
• Translate recurring startup needs into repeatable playbooks and reference architectures.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for founders and CTOs.
• Balance urgent customer needs with OpenAI product and platform priorities.
• Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality and customer judgment.
• Partner across Sales, Product, Engineering, and Research teams.

Required qualifications

• Proven experience founding, scaling, or operating within early-stage startups in technical leadership roles.
• 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.
• Ability to work 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. They seek to safely deploy AI to the world through their products.