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AI Deployment Engineering Manager, Startups

OpenAI, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead and scale the AI Deployment Engineering team specifically focused on high-growth startups, ensuring they transition efficiently from experimentation to production-grade AI integration using OpenAI’s technologies.
• Define and refine the strategic operating model for startup customer engagement, aligning team activities with OpenAI’s broader product goals and the dynamic needs of early-stage AI-native companies.
• Mentor and grow a team of technical individual contributors who provide hands-on deployment support to startups, focusing on API integration, architectural guidance, and production deployment best practices.
• Partner directly with Sales to identify high-potential startup accounts where technical engagement will accelerate adoption, increase usage metrics, and drive long-term account growth.
• Serve as the primary technical escalation point for startup founders, CTOs, and engineering leadership, providing strategic advice on AI system design, model performance optimization, and deployment architecture.
• Translate recurring startup challenges into scalable solutions by creating repeatable deployment playbooks, reference architectures, starter kits, and internal tooling to empower the broader deployment team.
• Synthesize high-signal customer feedback on developer experience, product gaps, deployment blockers, and emerging use cases, and relay actionable insights to Product, Engineering, and Research teams.
• Balance urgent, high-impact customer requests with OpenAI’s long-term platform strategy, making pragmatic decisions on when to customize support versus build scalable, reusable infrastructure.
• Coach AI Deployment Engineers on technical excellence, customer judgment, prioritization frameworks, executive communication, and cross-functional collaboration with Sales, Product, and Engineering.
• Drive the creation of referenceable customer success stories by ensuring successful, measurable production deployments that demonstrate meaningful usage and business impact.
• Establish strong feedback loops between startup customers and internal product teams to influence roadmap priorities based on real-world AI deployment challenges and opportunities.
• Maintain a relentless focus on quality, safety, and responsible AI deployment, ensuring all technical engagements uphold OpenAI’s core values and ethical guidelines.
• Optimize team capacity and coverage to serve a rapidly expanding and highly diverse startup customer base without compromising depth of engagement or technical rigor.
• Represent the startup segment internally as the technical voice of customers, advocating for developer-centric improvements, streamlined onboarding, and reduced friction in production adoption.
• Monitor key metrics including token usage, production workloads, customer satisfaction, and engagement velocity to evaluate team effectiveness and inform strategic adjustments.
• Collaborate across GTM teams to ensure seamless handoffs from sales to technical onboarding and ongoing support, creating a unified experience for startup customers.

🎯 Requirements

• Proven experience founding, scaling, or operating in early-stage startups, preferably in a technical leadership role with ownership of product outcomes and technical execution
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead technical, customer-facing teams in high-growth, ambiguous, or startup-heavy environments
• Strong technical depth across APIs, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, and production deployment architectures
• Experience creating scalable operating models and repeatable processes, not just managing one-off customer escalations
• Comfort working directly with founders, CTOs, and technical executives in fast-paced, high-stakes environments
• Strong judgment in prioritizing strategic customer engagements versus building scalable, systemic solutions

🏖️ Benefits

• Opportunity to shape how cutting-edge AI is deployed in high-impact startup ecosystems
• Collaborative environment with world-class researchers, engineers, and product teams at OpenAI
• Exposure to frontier AI technologies and direct feedback from leading startup innovators
• Competitive compensation package including equity, health benefits, and professional development opportunities

Skills & Technologies

Onsite

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OpenAI, Inc.

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About OpenAI, Inc.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

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