Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Head of Industries role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the intersection of platform adoption and industry-specific go-to-market design. The remit spans Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences, where software value is often gated by governance, procurement complexity, and risk constraints. That combination makes the position less about generic revenue leadership and more about building repeatable ways to commercialize advanced technology in environments where trust and compliance shape buying decisions.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role offers durable exposure to the operating mechanics that matter at scale: multi-layer leadership, forecasting discipline, portfolio prioritization, and cross-functional alignment with product, legal, security, and finance. Experience shaping segmentation, coverage, and investment allocation in regulated verticals tends to transfer well across enterprise SaaS, especially for companies moving upmarket or expanding into compliance-heavy industries.
The role is best suited to a seasoned GTM leader who prefers creating structure across multiple business lines and coaching senior managers rather than owning a single region or segment directly. It will fit someone motivated by complex stakeholder environments and by translating platform capabilities into industry-specific commercial motions that can be executed consistently over time.
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 Role
As Head of Industries, you will serve as a second-line sales leader responsible for our Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences verticals.
You will set the strategy for how we win in regulated industries, lead and develop senior leaders across those businesses, and partner cross-functionally to ensure OpenAI can scale durable, compliant growth in some of the world’s most complex customer environments.
Key Responsibilities
Lead and develop the senior leaders responsible for Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences, raising the bar on execution, talent, and culture across the portfolio.
Build a high-accountability leadership operating model with strong inspection rhythms, talent reviews, and coaching mechanisms that scale through frontline and second-line leaders.
Own the vertical GTM strategy for regulated industries, including segmentation, account prioritization, coverage design, and investment allocation.
Shape how OpenAI lands, expands, and retains customers in highly regulated markets, balancing growth objectives with risk management and long-term platform adoption.
Establish rigorous forecasting, pipeline inspection, and business review cadences that create visibility, predictability, and fast decision-making.
Drive execution on complex, multi-stakeholder deals with senior executives, procurement, legal, security, and compliance stakeholders across large enterprises.
Bring deep pattern recognition in regulated-industry sales motions, helping teams navigate governance, data sensitivity, model risk, and implementation complexity.
Partner closely with product, solutions, legal, policy, security, and finance teams to remove blockers and design scalable approaches for regulated customers.
Represent the voice of regulated-industry customers internally, influencing product priorities, messaging, packaging, and commercial strategy.
Partner with marketing and field teams to refine the Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences narratives and build repeatable demand-generation motions.
Help structure commercial frameworks, approval paths, and resource allocation decisions that align customer needs with OpenAI’s growth and risk objectives.
Ensure strong collaboration across pre-sales and post-sales teams so customers move from evaluation to production with clear ownership and long-term success plans.
What We’re Looking For
15–20 years of experience leading enterprise sales or go-to-market organizations, with substantial time in senior leadership roles at scale.
Demonstrated success owning and scaling large, complex regulated-industry businesses, ideally across Financial Services, Healthcare, and/or Life Sciences.
Strong expertise in regulated industries and a clear point of view on how to sell, deploy, and expand in environments with high compliance and governance requirements.
Exceptional operating rigor, including business planning, forecasting, performance management, and data-driven decision-making.
A low-ego, high-standards leader who can influence across functions and build trust with executives, peers, and teams.
Comfort leading through ambiguity and change while building structure, clarity, and durable execution in a fast-moving environment.
Experience leading through multiple layers of management and developing senior leaders is strongly preferred.
Skills/experience
Non-negotiables:
Deep expertise leading teams and businesses in regulated industries, with credibility in Financial Services, Healthcare, and/or Life Sciences.
15–20 years of experience in enterprise sales or GTM leadership, including meaningful experience managing through multiple layers of leadership.
Proven ability to build strategy and operating cadence for complex, consultative, and compliance-sensitive sales motions.
Strong talent leadership, with a track record of hiring, coaching, and elevating senior leaders and building high-performing organizations.
Strong Preferences:
Experience in AI, cloud, platform, or other highly technical product environments.
Experience influencing product, legal, risk, or commercial decisions based on customer needs in regulated markets.
Experience with consumption-based and platform sales models.
Coachables/Nice to Have:
Direct OpenAI experience is not required if the candidate can quickly build fluency in AI platforms and articulate business value credibly.
Experience working across both high-growth and large-scale enterprise environments.
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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