Support Delivery Lead, Government

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team helps customers adopt AI successfully and get exceptional value from our products. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and partner with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering, Security, and other teams to deliver an excellent customer experience at scale. The Government Support Delivery team serves public-sector customers, including U.S. Government agencies and organizations operating under FedRAMP requirements. We help customers deploy and use OpenAI products reliably while navigating complex technical, security, and compliance needs. About the Role We are looking for an experienced technical support leader to build and lead the team responsible for supporting OpenAI’s government customers. You will set the team’s technical and operational direction, develop talented support engineers, and ensure that complex customer issues are resolved with urgency, sound judgment, and care. Your team will work directly with public-sector customers and partner closely with Product, Engineering, Security, Technical Success, and customer-facing teams. You will turn what the team learns from customer issues into lasting improvements across our products, documentation, tools, and support practices. This is an opportunity to shape a critical support function from the ground up and define how OpenAI delivers trusted, technically excellent support to government customers. This role is based in Washington, D.C. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. To comply with a U.S. government contract, applicants for this position must be U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, or U.S. persons (i.e., U.S. lawful permanent residents, refugees, and asylees). This role is based in Washington, DC. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Build and lead a team of highly skilled support engineers, setting clear expectations and creating an environment in which people can do their best work and grow. - Set the technical and operational direction for Government Support Delivery, including service standards, success measures, team practices, and coverage planning. - Serve as a senior escalation point for complex and high-impact customer issues, coordinating the right experts across OpenAI and communicating clearly with customer and internal leaders. - Develop a support model that meets the needs of U.S. Government agencies and other public-sector customers, including organizations operating under FedRAMP requirements. - Build trusted relationships with strategic customers and represent OpenAI with professionalism, discretion, and sound judgment during critical issues. - Partner with Product, Engineering, Security, Technical Success, and customer-facing teams to improve escalation paths, launch readiness, product quality, and the overall customer experience. - Turn recurring customer issues into scalable solutions through better processes, documentation, training, self-service resources, automation, and product improvements. - Help scale global support operations, including on-call, holiday, and weekend coverage based on business needs, while contributing to the broader Support Delivery leadership team. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 12+ years of experience in technical support engineering, software engineering, customer engineering, site reliability, infrastructure, or a related technical field. - 6+ years of experience leading technical support engineering, customer engineering, or software engineering teams in high-scale, security-sensitive, or fast-moving environments. - A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, another relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience. - Experience supporting government, public-sector, regulated, or security-conscious customers and working through complex technical and organizational requirements. - Strong technical depth across areas such as SaaS applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, authentication, networking, observability, or distributed systems. - A record of developing experienced technical teams, setting a clear direction, and balancing customer outcomes with team health and sustainable operations. - Experience leading critical incidents and customer escalations involving senior technical and business stakeholders. - The ability to influence Product and Engineering priorities using customer insights, operational data, and clear judgment. - A systems-oriented approach and experience using AI, automation, scripting, or internal tools to improve support quality and scale. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical, security, and compliance topics to a range of audiences. - A collaborative, mission-driven approach grounded in integrity, humility, discretion, and a strong commitment to customer impact. 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. Ba