Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Support Delivery Lead role stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the intersection of developer-facing support and production-grade reliability for customers building on AI models. The remit spans a wide customer spectrum, from startups to global enterprises, which is a common pattern for platform SaaS where product usage and support complexity vary sharply by maturity, scale, and integration depth.
For a SaaS career, the role offers durable exposure to how support operations become a lever for adoption and retention when the product is technical. Leading customer support engineers while partnering with Product and Engineering builds fluency in escalation management, feedback loops, and turning recurring issues into prioritised improvements. That combination is highly transferable across API-first SaaS businesses where customer experience depends on both tooling and cross-functional execution.
The position is best suited to a leader who enjoys coaching technical teams, bringing structure to ambiguous problem spaces, and representing support perspectives in broader planning. It will appeal to professionals who prefer hands-on operational ownership alongside stakeholder alignment, and who want to deepen credibility in enterprise-grade SaaS support delivery within a hybrid London setup.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Customer Support Engineering team is dedicated to solving some of the most complex problems faced by our diverse customers, ranging from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. Our mission is to ensure developers and enterprises can reliably build mission-critical solutions using OpenAI models. We provide technical guidance, troubleshoot complex issues through support tickets and Slack messages, and partner closely with Technical Success, Product, and Engineering teams to resolve challenges and deliver the best possible customer experience at scale. By supporting customers in maximizing value and adoption, we help them deploy our highly-capable models effectively and successfully.
About the Role:
As a User Operations Team Lead at OpenAI, you will play a critical role in overseeing a dynamic team of Customer Support Engineers. Your leadership will ensure that team members are well-supported and able to perform at their highest potential. You will conduct performance reviews and manage general performance, fostering a culture of excellence and collaboration within and across teams.
This role is based in London. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
Key Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Development: Lead and support a team of customer support engineers, ensuring they have the tools, guidance, and mentorship needed to excel. Foster a high-performance culture by removing operational roadblocks, coaching team members, and investing in upskilling initiatives.
Performance Management: Conduct regular performance reviews, provide actionable feedback, and implement tailored development plans to enhance both individual and team growth, driving excellence across the board.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a bridge between the team and other departments, facilitating seamless communication and ensuring collaborative success on cross-functional initiatives.
Project Ownership: Oversee and actively contribute to user operations projects, representing the generalist teams in leadership discussions and ensuring the successful execution of key initiatives.
Strategic Planning: Contribute to the development of innovative strategies that drive the efficiency, scalability, and growth of the user operations team, aligning with organizational goals.
Customer-Centric Problem Solving: Partner with engineering teams to resolve complex customer issues, while generating valuable insights to inform product development and GTM strategies.
Escalation & Representation: Handle escalated customer or partner engagements with professionalism, ensuring OpenAI is well-represented in challenging situations and complex builds.
Qualifications:
More than 5 years of leadership experience, ideally in a Support, IT, Engineering, or similar environment.
Strong interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to inspire and motivate a team.
Excellent project management skills, with a track record of successfully leading cross-functional projects.
Strategic thinking with the ability to contribute to high-level planning and decision-making.
A collaborative mindset with the ability to work effectively across various departments.
Familiarity with data science concepts and the ability to translate complex data insights into actionable business strategies.
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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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
