Lead, Ads Prospecting & Customer Intelligence

About the Team OpenAI is building the next generation of advertising for an AI-powered world. As AI changes how people discover information, explore possibilities, and make decisions, we believe this presents a huge opportunity for small and medium-sized businesses to connect with customers in new ways. The SMB Ads Marketing team is building this opportunity from the ground up. We define how businesses discover OpenAI’s advertising platform, become successful advertisers, and grow their investment over time. Working closely with Product, Ads Engineering, Data Science, and Sales, we combine customer insight, rigorous experimentation, and fast execution to turn early opportunities into scalable growth. About the Role We are hiring a Lead, Ads Prospecting & Growth Intelligence to build the intelligence and orchestration platform powering OpenAI’s ads business. This person will help us identify the right companies and people, understand why they are relevant, determine the right next action, and learn from what happens afterward. Own the prospecting function for the ads business, serving SMB Ads while building a foundation reusable across segments. Set the vision, operating model, roadmap, platform choices, business rules, adoption, and outcomes; and partner with Ads Engineering, Data Science, and internal platform teams. Decide what to build in-house, enable through internal platforms, or deliver through selected vendors and partners. In This Role, You Will - Lead the function’s strategy, roadmap, operating model, and adoption. Connect platform investments to measurable advertiser and business outcomes. - Define a unified prospect, account, contact, and advertiser data model. Establish standards for identity, data quality, provenance, freshness, confidence, and consent. - Combine market, intent, behavioral, product, CRM, campaign, and customer-success signals to improve targeting and customer engagement. - Design enrichment and verification workflows. Evaluate in-house capabilities, platforms, vendors, APIs, AI, and human review to select effective solutions. - Develop scoring and next-best-action models using customer fit, intent, activity, reachability, lifecycle stage, and growth potential. - Connect intelligence to action across sales, marketing, product, paid media, partners, and lifecycle journeys through coordinated routing and activation. - Enable marketers to create audiences, configure triggered journeys, run experiments, and execute campaigns through intuitive systems with quality checks and approvals. - Build feedback loops that use outreach, engagement, conversion, spend, retention, churn, and customer-success outcomes to improve targeting and lifecycle decisions. - Measure data quality, coverage, targeting accuracy, deliverability, conversion, and incremental value. Establish permissions, suppression, auditability, and provider-performance standards. You Might Thrive in This Role If You - Bring substantial experience building go-to-market systems, customer-data products, growth platforms, lifecycle infrastructure, revenue systems, or marketing technology. - Demonstrate ownership of platforms that connect data, decisions, and workflows to measurable commercial outcomes. - Apply strong product judgment to prioritize opportunities, define useful solutions, and sequence delivery. - Translate identity resolution, enrichment, scoring, segmentation, routing, experimentation, and feedback loops into clear system requirements. - Design practical solutions with marketers and sales teams, grounded in their campaign and customer workflows. - Explore data and test ideas with tools such as analytics platforms, SQL, APIs, automation, or AI-assisted prototyping. Production engineering experience is not required. - Evaluate build, buy, and integration choices across CRM, marketing automation, customer data platforms, and campaign-execution systems. - Lead a small team and build alignment with senior cross-functional partners. - Apply sound judgment to privacy, consent, deliverability, data rights, governance, and customer trust. - Bring relevant experience in advertising, SMB or self-serve businesses, product-led SaaS, marketplaces, commerce, fintech, enterprise go-to-market, or other multi-segment customer journeys. Preferred Qualifications - Experience building prospecting or customer intelligence platforms for advertising, SMB, or self-serve businesses. - Track record combining customer and intent data to improve targeting and conversion. - Experience deploying enrichment, scoring, and next-best-action models across marketing and sales. - Experience integrating data vendors, CRM, marketing automation, and customer data platforms. - Hands-on experience using SQL, APIs, automation, or AI to validate growth solutions. - Experience building feedback loops and governance practices that improve performance, data quality, and trust. Workplace & Location - San Francisco, CA. This role requires a hybrid schedule with an in office requirement from Monday - Wednesday. 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/polic