Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Startups)
$302k - $335k • Remote • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
OpenAI is seeking an Applied AI Engineering Manager for its Startups team. This role will lead and scale efforts to help high-growth startups move from experimentation to production, unlock significant usage, and build strong technical partnerships. The manager will operate in a fast-paced environment, working closely with founders, CTOs, and technical teams, requiring speed, sound judgment, and hands-on problem-solving. The position involves balancing team leadership, technical expertise, customer prioritization, and cross-functional collaboration with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Research teams. The core responsibility is to define how OpenAI supports startup customers at scale, identifying opportunities for deep technical engagement, building repeatable deployment processes, and ensuring the team can serve a diverse customer base effectively.
Responsibilities
- Define and refine the strategic vision and operating model for the Startups Applied AI Engineering team.
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of technical individual contributors supporting startup customers.
- Assist startups in transitioning from experimentation to production by identifying technical blockers and advising on architecture.
- Collaborate with Sales to accelerate customer adoption, production usage, and account growth through technical engagement.
- Represent the technical voice of startup customers by synthesizing feedback on developer experience, product gaps, and model performance.
- Develop repeatable playbooks, starter packs, reference architectures, and internal tooling to improve team efficiency.
- Serve as a senior technical escalation point for priority startup customers.
- Balance urgent customer needs with OpenAI's product and platform priorities.
- Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality, customer judgment, prioritization, and communication.
- Partner with Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and GTM teams to enhance startup support.
Requirements
- Proven experience founding, scaling, or operating within early-stage startups, ideally in technical leadership roles.
- Strong track record of building and leading technical, customer-facing teams in high-growth or ambiguous environments.
- Deep technical understanding of APIs, platform products, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, and production deployment.
- Experience creating scalable operating models.
- Comfort working directly with founders, CTOs, technical executives, and highly technical individual contributors.
- Strong judgment in balancing deep customer engagement with building repeatable mechanisms.
- Ability to translate complex technical and product considerations into clear guidance and recommendations.
- Ability to operate with speed, iteration, and pragmatic customer impact while maintaining quality and safety.
- Commitment to the safe and beneficial development of AI.