Dedicated Support Engineering Lead

Compensation

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The salary range for this role is $347K – $385K, with generous equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

About the Team

OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products.

About the Role

We’re looking for a senior leader to build and scale our Dedicated Support Engineering function globally. You will define its strategy, build the team, and establish how we deliver technically rigorous, proactive support for customers running some of the most complex and consequential workloads on OpenAI.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy for Dedicated Support Engineering. Define the function’s charter, service model, priorities, and growth plan. Translate customer needs and company priorities into clear decisions about where to invest and how to scale.
• Build and develop a high-performing global organization. Hire and coach senior technical talent, develop future leaders, and establish expectations for technical depth, customer ownership, collaboration, and performance.
• Design the customer engagement model. Establish how DSEs are assigned to customers, build account knowledge, conduct operational reviews, and prepare for critical events. Define clear responsibilities and handoffs with Support, Technical Success, Sales, and Engineering.
• Set the standard for technical ownership. Ensure the team uses evidence, reproduction, and systems-level investigation to advance complex issues. Develop the team’s judgment on when to continue investigating, mitigate, or engage Engineering, and stay close enough to the work to guide difficult decisions.
• Build proactive reliability into the service. Establish practices for assessing customer architectures and dependencies, identifying emerging risks, and preparing for launches, migrations, and traffic growth. Ensure incident learnings lead to completed corrective actions.
• Lead through critical customer situations. Serve as a senior escalation point, align responders across teams, and communicate clearly with customer executives. Maintain accountability for the customer’s support experience through mitigation, resolution, and follow-through.
• Own delivery quality and sustainable growth. Build capacity plans, coverage arrangements, and investment proposals that support service commitments. Balance customer complexity, team workload, and time for proactive work as the customer portfolio grows.
• Define and measure meaningful outcomes. Establish measures of investigation quality, time to mitigation, recurring issue reduction, customer confidence, and proactive risk reduction. Use these insights to improve the service and guide investment.
• Influence product and engineering priorities. Turn patterns across customer investigations into evidence-backed recommendations. Build alignment with senior partners on reliability, observability, supportability, and tooling improvements.
• Make AI and automation foundational to the function. Apply OpenAI’s technology to preserve customer context, accelerate investigations, detect risks, and automate repeatable work. Establish evaluations and human oversight so these capabilities improve quality and customer trust.

Requirements

• Have 12+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles, including 6+ years of leadership responsibility for enterprise Support Engineering, Technical Account Management, or a comparable function supporting complex production environments.
• Have built or materially scaled a dedicated technical customer program, with ownership of its service model, staffing, delivery standards, and outcomes.
• Bring experience leading senior engineers and developing technical leaders across regions, with a clear approach to hiring, coaching, and performance.
• Have a strong technical foundation in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations. You can evaluate investigation quality, challenge hypotheses, and guide teams through ambiguous failures.
• Have maintained long-term technical relationships with strategic enterprise customers, connecting architecture and workload context to business impact and operational priorities.
• Have led high-stakes customer escalations and can earn trust with both engineering teams and executives while communicating uncertainty accurately.
• Can influence senior stakeholders across organizational boundaries, resolve competing priorities, and translate customer evidence into concrete technical and operational changes.
• Have demonstrated sound judgment in balancing customer commitments, service quality, staffing, and the economics of a growing support function.
• Have delivered measurable improvements through automation or AI and can distinguish promising experiments from capabilities ready for dependable customer use.
• Are comfortable establishing direction in ambiguity, taking accountability for difficult decisions, and building a team that operates with curiosity, humility, and urgency.