AI Deployment Engineering Manager, Startups

About the Team

The AI Deployment Engineering team partners closely with customers to help them move from experimentation to production with OpenAIs 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 AI Deployment Engineering Manager Startups to lead and scale the Startups AI Deployment Engineering motion. This team helps high-growth startups move quickly from experimentation to production unlock meaningful usage and build durable technical partnerships with OpenAI.

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 AI Deployment Engineering team aligning it with OpenAIs 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.

• 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 OpenAIs broader product and platform priorities especially when startups request niche features bespoke support or accelerated roadmap changes.

• Coach AI Deployment Engineers on technical quality customer judgment prioritization executive communication and cross-functional partnership.

• Partner across Sales Product Engineering Research and other GTM teams to improve how OpenAI supports startups from early adoption through scaled production usage.

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 OpenAIs long-term platform strategy.

• Are personally committed to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI.

Success in This Role May Look Like

• Increased startup account usage including tokens requests and production workloads.

• A strong cadence of successful customer sprints and production-oriented technical engagements.

• High-quality customer stories founder and CTO satisfaction and referenceable startup wins.

• Creation of repeatable startup deployment patterns starter packs templates and reference architectures.

• Strong Product and Research feedback loops informed by startup customer needs and emerging use cases.

• 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 OpenAIs Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Required Experience:

Manager