Applied AI Engineering Manager, Startups | Greenfield

Summary: Lead and scale the Applied AI Engineering team for startups, focusing on helping early-stage companies move from experimentation to production deployment. This role involves defining strategic vision, mentoring technical staff, and partnering with sales and product teams to drive customer adoption and technical succ...

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.
• Represent the technical voice of startup customers by synthesizing high-signal feedback, especially around developer experience, product gaps, deployment blockers, model performance, and emerging use cases.
• Translate recurring startup needs into repeatable playbooks, starter packs, reference architectures, internal tooling, and customer-facing assets that help the broader team move faster.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for priority startup customers, including founder-, CTO-, and technical executive-level conversations.
• Balance urgent customer needs with OpenAI’s broader product and platform priorities, especially when startups request niche features, bespoke support, or accelerated roadmap changes.
• Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality, customer judgment, prioritization, executive communication, and cross-functional partnership.
• Work closely with VC Partnerships, Marketing, and developer-facing teams to turn ecosystem relationships and programmes into technical engagement, first production deployments, and sustained adoption. Build repeatable technical programmes, workshops, and starter patterns that expand the team’s reach.

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 will be measured by:

• A strong cadence of successful customer sprints, first production deployments, and competitive migrations.
• Strong Product and Research feedback loops informed by startup customer needs and emerging use cases.
• Sustained growth in startup usage following activation or migration, including tokens, requests, and production workloads, with clear handoffs into Core coverage.
• High-quality customer stories, founder and CTO satisfaction, and referenceable startup wins.
• Creation of repeatable technical programmes, startup deployment patterns, starter packs, templates, and reference architectures that expand technical reach.
• 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf).

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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.