Head of Technical Success, Government

Job description

About the team The OpenAI for Government team partners with federal, state, local, defense, national security, and international public-sector organizations to securely and responsibly adopt frontier AI, strengthen public services, and deliver meaningful mission impact. About the role OpenAI is seeking a strategic and deeply technical leader to serve as the Head of Government Technical Success. This leader will oversee the technical functions across the government customer lifecycle, spanning pre-sales engagement, prototype-to-production delivery, and post-sales adoption and value realization. You will define and operate a unified technical success strategy across federal civilian, defense and national security, state and local, international public sector, and industry partners. Your mission is to help customers identify the highest value applications of OpenAI’s technology, navigate the technical and organizational requirements of government environments, move those applications into production, and scale adoption in ways that deliver measurable mission impact. This role combines organizational leadership, technical judgment, executive customer engagement, operating rigor, and product influence. You will partner closely with Government Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, Legal, Global Affairs and Policy, and other teams to ensure a seamless customer experience for governments in the United States and around the world. This role is based in Washington, DC. We offer relocation support to new employees. In this role, you will - Set and continuously refine the strategy, operating model, and priorities for Government Technical Success, aligning the organization to OpenAI’s broader objectives and the distinct needs of government customers. - Build and lead an organization of technical success personnel, including hiring, organizational design, manager development, career growth, and high standards for technical and customer-facing excellence. - Create a seamless technical journey for government customers, including discovery and technical qualification through architecture, prototyping, production deployment, enablement, adoption, and ongoing value realization. - Partner with Government Sales and account leaders on technical strategy, account planning, resource allocation, and engagement models, enabling the team to focus its deepest support on the opportunities with the greatest mission value and strategic importance. - Serve as a technical executive sponsor for OpenAI’s most strategic government and partner relationships. Build trust with senior mission leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, technical teams, and other key government stakeholders. - Guide internal teams and customers through the realities of government deployment, including security, privacy, identity, data handling, governance, accessibility, integration, compliance, procurement, accreditation, and change management requirements. - Ensure customers can successfully evaluate, configure, integrate, deploy, and adopt OpenAI products in the appropriate government environments, including ChatGPT Enterprise, Codex, the OpenAI API, and emerging capabilities. - Establish clear measures of technical success across the customer lifecycle, including technical qualification, deployment velocity and quality, production use, activation and sustained adoption, account health, renewal and expansion, customer satisfaction, and demonstrated mission outcomes. - Scale the organization’s impact through reusable playbooks, reference architectures, demos, prototypes, workshops, training, community resources, implementation patterns, and partner enablement. - Develop strong operating partnerships with systems integrators, cloud and technology partners, and implementation teams that help government customers move from experimentation to durable production deployments. - Represent the technical voice of government customers by synthesizing field patterns, use cases, blockers, product gaps, and emerging requirements into feedback for Product, Engineering, Research, Security, and Policy teams. - Anticipate customer and market challenges, intervene directly on critical engagements, and bring clarity to ambiguous or high-stakes situations. - Champion a customer-first and mission-first culture that pairs urgency with safety, responsibility, public trust, and long-term stewardship. You’ll thrive in this role if you Bring 10+ years of experience with public sector customers and have a strong track record of building and leading multidisciplinary technical customer-facing organizations across the full customer lifecycle, including developing and leading managers. - Have led leaders and high-performing technical teams through periods of rapid growth, ambiguity, and organizational change, and can create clarity without adding unnecessary process. - Bring deep technical acumen in AI and platform technologies, with credibility across model behavior and limitations, APIs and SDKs, agentic systems, retrieval and evaluation patterns, enterprise architecture, identity, data controls, security, cloud integration, reliability, observability, and operational readiness. - Have significant experience serving government or similarly complex regulated customers and understand how mission objectives, security and compliance requirements, procurement, implementation partners, workforce adoption, and public accountability shape technical delivery. - Have meaningful experience serving international government customers or leading international teams, with a practical understanding of how regulatory, procurement, security, data sovereignty, policy, and delivery requirements vary across countries and regions. - Have led complex AI, machine learning, or enterprise platform implementations from early discovery through stable production and scaled adoption. - Can translate complex technical concepts, tradeoffs, and strategies into clear decisions for executive, technical, operational, policy, and non-technical audiences. - Are an exceptional executive communicator who can build trust, present a compelling point of view, listen deeply, and navigate consequential customer relationships. - Use data and field evidence to evaluate organizational effectiveness, customer health, resource allocation, and technical success, and can turn that evidence into action. - Collaborate effectively across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, Legal, Policy, and partner organizations, and can influence outcomes without relying on formal authority. - Operate with high ownership, strong judgment, and a willingness to dive into the details when needed. - Lead with humility, curiosity, and care for people, and are committed to building an inclusive, high-accountability team. - Are personally committed to the safe and responsible development and deployment of AI for the benefit of the public. Nice to have - Leadership experience across multiple public-sector segments, such as federal civilian, defense and national security, state and local, or international government. - Experience in the AI industry or leading technical success for an enterprise platform product. - Experience serving as the technical executive sponsor and escalation authority for strategic accounts. - Experience building partner-led delivery models with systems integrators, cloud providers, or implementation partners. - An existing U.S. security clearance; a clearance is not required, but strongly preferred. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf 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.