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Dedicated Support Engineering Lead

OpenAI· User Operations
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$347k - $385k + equityFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Senior leader responsible for building and scaling OpenAI's Dedicated Support Engineering (DSE) function globally. Defines strategy, builds the team, and delivers technically rigorous, proactive support for enterprise customers running complex workloads, with a focus on reliability, incident handling, and customer outcomes.

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.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Experience building or scaling a dedicated technical customer program, with ownership of its service model, staffing, delivery standards, and outcomes.
  • Experience leading senior engineers and developing technical leaders across regions, with a clear approach to hiring, coaching, and performance.
  • Strong technical foundation in APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations. Ability to evaluate investigation quality, challenge hypotheses, and guide teams through ambiguous failures.
  • Maintained long-term technical relationships with strategic enterprise customers, connecting architecture and workload context to business impact and operational priorities.
  • Led high-stakes customer escalations and earned trust with both engineering teams and executives while communicating uncertainty accurately.
  • Ability to influence senior stakeholders, resolve competing priorities, and translate customer evidence into concrete technical and operational changes.
  • Judgment balancing customer commitments, service quality, staffing, and economics of a growing support function.
  • Experience delivering measurable improvements through automation or AI and distinguishing promising experiments from production-ready capabilities.
  • Comfort establishing direction in ambiguity, taking accountability for difficult decisions, and building a curious, humble, and urgent team.

Skills

Required:Strategic leadershipPeople leadershipTechnical ownership and investigationsapi / distributed systems knowledgeStakeholder management

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
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Oct 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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