About the team

The OpenAI for Government team brings frontier AI to public institutions to help them achieve their missions. We partner with government leaders, mission owners, and technical teams to deploy AI tools responsibly, with the reliability, security, and support needed for meaningful use.

Our Federal Civilian and State & Local Government business supports public institutions across a broad range of missions. We help these customers apply frontier AI to public services, knowledge work, research, and mission operations through hands-on delivery, tailored enablement, and collaboration with their teams.

About the Role

The Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL), Federal Civilian & State and Local Government, will shape and deliver high-impact AI engagements across federal civilian agencies and state and local governments. You will turn customer priorities into practical deployments and sustained use, helping government leaders and mission teams apply OpenAI technology to public services, knowledge discovery, and operational workflows.

This individual contributor role reports to the leader of Federal Civilian and State & Local Government. You will work alongside Account Directors and Applied AI Architects across assigned engagements, coordinating Research, Product, Engineering, Policy, Security, and Enablement resources. Account Directors own commercial strategy, contracts, and quota; you own delivery coordination, adoption, and customer outcomes, without an individual sales quota.

You will lead execution across customer and OpenAI workstreams: define scope, milestones, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and success measures; surface risks; resolve blockers; and communicate progress to agency executives, program leaders, and working teams. You are accountable for agreed delivery commitments and customer acceptance. Engineering and Product teams remain responsible for technical implementation and operation of the systems they own.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role combining senior relationship leadership with hands-on execution. Success requires sound judgment, technical fluency, strong program management, and the ability to turn executive alignment into useful technology in government teams’ hands.

This role is based in Washington, DC, with domestic travel for high-value customer engagements, workshops, and delivery milestones.

In this role, you will:

• Build trusted relationships with senior government leaders, program owners, and technical and mission teams to identify priorities and turn senior alignment into actionable engagements.

• Own delivery plans for assigned federal civilian and state and local government engagements, with clear milestones, accountable owners, customer acceptance criteria, and measurable mission or operational outcomes.

• Translate customer and mission needs into requirements and decisions that engineers, domain experts, and senior leaders can act on; communicate progress, limitations, risks, and dependencies clearly.

• Connect customer mission and technical teams with OpenAI Research, Product, and Engineering teams to assess promising applications and move feasible opportunities into scoped, supported projects.

• Coordinate the Applied AI Architect, specialist engineers, and customer technical teams on architecture, data access, evaluation, integration, and deployment requirements.

• Build sustained adoption through practical enablement, user feedback, workflow support, and repeatable playbooks that can be applied across agencies and government customers.

• Lead executive reviews and focused workshops in Washington and at customer sites, bringing the right decision-makers and technical experts together to resolve issues and advance delivery.

• Identify security, data, infrastructure, contractual, and resourcing risks early; work with the accountable teams to resolve them and escalate decisions promptly.

• Prioritize across a small, matrixed team, make clear trade-offs, and maintain momentum as customer needs and model capabilities evolve.

• Coordinate with Account Directors, policy colleagues, and partners on broader government engagement, while keeping delivery commitments aligned with available resources and approved capabilities.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience leading complex technical programs, customer delivery, or transformation initiatives, including substantial work with federal civilian agencies, state or local governments, or comparable public institutions.

• Can meet customer-specific access requirements. An active DOE Q and/or U.S. Government TS/SCI clearance is preferred for engagements involving national security missions.

• Are willing to travel domestically when an in-person engagement materially advances customer priorities, relationships, or delivery; use Washington-based engagement and remote collaboration effectively.

• Understand how government executives, program owners, acquisition stakeholders, and technical teams make decisions and deliver work; navigate organizational boundaries to turn priorities into execution.

• Have led complex AI/ML, enterprise software, API, cloud, scientific computing, or digital transformation engagements through implementation and sustained adoption.

• Bring executive presence and a record of influencing senior government leaders, while remaining personally accountable for follow-through with working teams.

• Translate mission goals into practical execution plans, acceptance criteria, and measures such as workflow adoption, staff productivity, output quality, and time to a validated outcome.

• Have enough technical fluency to evaluate AI use cases, challenge assumptions, and work credibly with architects and domain experts on data integration, model evaluation, and deployment trade-offs.

• Are curious about frontier AI and actively experiment with the technology to understand its capabilities, limitations, and applications to government work.

• Build durable partnerships across mission teams, engineers, security teams, program owners, and executives; thrive in ambiguity and take initiative in a fast-moving environment.

• See yourself as a bridge between frontier AI research and practical mission impact, with the judgment to distinguish a promising demonstration from a validated outcome.

• Help customers use AI responsibly, with appropriate data protection, human review, provenance, reproducibility, and validation suited to the mission and use case.

• Existing relationships across federal civilian agencies or state and local governments are valuable. Experience with DOE, national labs, NASA, or NSF is one relevant area of expertise.

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.

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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Compensation

$266K – $370K + Offers Equity