# Strategic Delivery Lead

**Company**: OpenAI
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: executive
**Job type**: Full time
**Salary**: $234K – $325K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124605186

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/e73c1f74-0f5a-45ed-a744-fa4aa8b97250
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_3aeeea9e-5e4

## Description

As a Strategic Delivery Lead at OpenAI, you will define how OpenAI orchestrates complex, multi-workstream customer programs end-to-end. Expect urgency to be high and ambiguity to be the default. You will own the plan, governance, and value realization - translating executive-level business outcomes into a delivery roadmap, running day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, Product, Partnerships, and customer teams, and ensuring adoption lands in production.

You will be accountable for the success of the overall program - sequencing work, aligning stakeholders, managing risk/change control, and making the trade-offs that protect the critical path. You’ll engage pre-close to shape scope, milestones, resourcing, and acceptance criteria, then lead post-close execution to measurable value. You’ll also ensure field insights are captured and fed back to Product and Research so patterns harden into platform capabilities.

You’ll coordinate and leverage a cross-functional bench that includes FDEs, Technical Deployment Leads (TDLs), Researchers, and Partnerships - effectively influencing without formal authority.

Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - time-to-first value, production adoption against clear acceptance criteria, and executive-level outcomes realized.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep transformation program leadership, executive presence, and an ability to bring structure to ambiguity while keeping pace high.

In this role, you will:

- Own strategic delivery for complex, multi-track programs. Act as the single accountable DRI overseeing program success. Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and value KPIs.

- Run day-to-day program execution. Sequence and unblock work across FDE, Research, Product, Partnerships, and customer teams. Operate robust program management processes.

- Protect the critical path. Identify delivery risks early and work cross-functionally to mitigate blockers and maintain program velocity.

- Own executive communication and alignment. Set the narrative, run SteerCos and decision-ready readouts, surface risks early, and have the hard conversations to protect the critical path. Leverage your technical fluency to crisply articulate technical details to executives.

- Engage pre-close to de-risk delivery. Co-lead discovery; shape scope and commercials; design the delivery plan and acceptance criteria; validate resourcing and risks.

- Drive adoption and change management. Embed with customer stakeholders to map workflows, land production deployments, and ensure onboarding, training, and operating models support sustained use.

- Codify patterns and playbooks. Extract reusable solution patterns and package field signal into pattern cards and product requests; shorten time-to-value on future deployments.

- Own value cases and ROI. Set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs; run pre-/post-measurement; report outcomes to executive sponsors and align on expansion.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

- Own end-to-end strategic deployments. 10+ years leading multi-workstream technical programs and 5+ years steering C-suite governance in a consulting role or a comparable leadership position in a technology company - taking technical initiatives from problem framing through production and adoption.

- Orchestrate multidisciplinary teams. Comfortable leading engineers, researchers, product, and partnerships; you create crisp roles, decision paths, and interfaces that keep pace high and blockers few.

- Bring structure to ambiguity. You quickly untangle complexity, apply logical framing, and communicate options clearly - balancing near-term delivery with a strategic view of the big picture.

- Bring technical fluency to exercise technical judgment. You understand core LLM solution patterns and integration fundamentals and use that fluency to pressure-test architectures and plans, surface risks and dependencies, make scope/speed/quality trade-offs, and ensure the path to production is feasible and value-aligned.

- Translate between business and technical. You can make complex work legible to non-technical executives and convert strategy into day-to-day execution plans for technical teams.

- Guide transformation with executives. You’ve partnered with the C-suite to align on vision, strategy, governance, and change management.

- Lean in on embedded execution. Willing to spend meaningful time on-site with customers (often 25–50%, sometimes higher) to unblock decisions, build trust, and accelerate adoption.

## Skills

### Required
- Technical deployment
- Program management
- Leadership
- Communication
- Problem-solving
- Risk management
- Change management
- Adoption and change management
- Value realization
- Executive presence
- Transformation program leadership