Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives)

ABOUT THE TEAM The Applied AI Engineering team partners closely with customers to help them turn frontier AI capabilities into real products, workflows, and business impact. We act as trusted technical partners across strategy, solution design, architecture, implementation, evaluation, and adoption, working alongside customers to build and scale effective AI applications with OpenAI’s technologies. The Digital Natives segment serves technology and software companies that are building AI into the core of their products and businesses. These customers are often highly technical, move quickly, and are among the earliest adopters of OpenAI’s newest capabilities. Our Applied AI Engineers work directly with their engineering, product, and technical leadership teams to identify high-impact opportunities, solve complex technical challenges, and bring ambitious AI applications into production. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking a Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives) to lead the team responsible for the technical success of our most strategic technology and software customers in the Americas. In this role, you will lead a team of Applied AI Engineers who work hands-on with customers to design, build, evaluate, and scale AI applications. You will help determine where deep technical partnership can unlock the greatest customer and business impact, while developing repeatable approaches that allow the team to support a broad and fast-moving customer segment. As a manager, you will set the strategy and operating model for the team, coach and develop engineers, and serve as a senior technical partner to customers and internal stakeholders. You will work closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Research to connect what we learn from customers with OpenAI’s product direction and help customers take advantage of our newest capabilities. Success in this role will be measured by meaningful production applications, sustained adoption and usage, strong customer outcomes, and technical patterns and insights that can be applied across the broader Digital Natives segment. This role is open in our San Francisco office. 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 - Own the strategy and operating model for the Digital Natives Applied AI Engineering team, ensuring alignment with OpenAI’s objectives and the evolving needs of technology and software customers. - Lead, hire, mentor, and develop a team of high-performing Applied AI Engineers responsible for delivering meaningful technical and customer outcomes. - Guide the team in working hands-on with customers to identify high-impact use cases, design and build AI applications, solve technical challenges, and scale successful solutions into production. - Partner closely with Sales to prioritize technical engagement across strategic customers and identify where Applied AI Engineering can unlock adoption, usage, and long-term customer growth. - Serve as a senior technical partner and escalation point for priority customers, building trusted relationships with engineering leaders, CTOs, and other executive stakeholders. - Represent the technical voice of Digital Native customers by synthesizing insights around model performance, developer experience, product gaps, emerging use cases, and technical blockers for Product, Engineering, and Research. - Translate recurring customer needs and successful implementations into repeatable technical patterns, reference architectures, playbooks, tooling, and best practices that allow the team to scale its impact. - Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality, customer judgment, prioritization, executive communication, and cross-functional partnership. - Help customers understand and apply OpenAI’s newest capabilities, identifying opportunities to build differentiated products and experiences with frontier models. - Champion the safe, reliable, and effective application of OpenAI’s technology across the Digital Natives ecosystem. YOU’LL THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU - Have 8+ years of experience in deeply technical, customer-facing roles such as applied engineering, solutions architecture, deployment engineering, technical consulting, or similar roles. - Have 2+ years of experience leading technical teams, with a demonstrated ability to hire, develop, mentor, and manage high-performing engineers. - Have experience building or deploying generative AI, machine learning, developer platforms, or cloud-based software solutions in production environments. - Bring strong technical depth across APIs, AI/ML systems, application architecture, cloud infrastructure, and modern developer workflows. - Have hands-on software engineering experience and fluency with programming languages such as Python or JavaScript. - Are comfortable working directly with highly technical engineering and product teams as well as CTOs and other executive stakeholders. - Can translate ambiguous customer and business problems into clear technical approaches and guide teams from exploration through implementation and production. - Demonstrate strong judgment about when to invest deeply in an individual customer challenge versus when to develop a repeatable solution for the broader segment. - Are an effective communicator who can translate complex technical and business topics across audiences and coach others to do the same. - Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and are energized by working with customers at the forefront of AI adoption. - Demonstrate strong ownership, humility, curiosity, and a commitment to helping both customers and teammates succeed. - Are personally committed to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI. 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. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. 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