Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Support Delivery Lead, Government stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the intersection of enterprise platform adoption and high-stakes operational reliability. The remit is not general customer support, but escalation ownership for complex deployments, with direct exposure to how an AI platform is used inside large, regulated institutions. That combination is increasingly central as SaaS expands beyond commercial buyers into public sector and other compliance-heavy environments.
From a SaaS career perspective, the role builds durable operating leverage skills: translating incident learnings into repeatable processes, shaping tooling and automation, and feeding support-driven insights back into product and engineering roadmaps. Leading global coverage also develops the systems thinking required in mature SaaS operations, where customer experience depends on scalable workflows, knowledge management, and tight cross-functional coordination rather than heroics.
This position is best suited to a senior operator who is comfortable being the technical point of accountability during critical issues and who enjoys building teams and mechanisms from first principles. It will fit professionals who prefer cross-functional influence over narrow ownership, and who are motivated by working with strategic accounts where reliability, clarity, and stakeholder management are as important as deep troubleshooting.
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
OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customer’s adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.
About the Role
We are looking for a leader to build and scale our Support Engineering team, which will collaborate directly with our strategic enterprise accounts, our product and engineering teams, as well as our field teams to solve some of the most difficult technical problems faced by our customers. You will lead one of the best technical troubleshooting teams at OpenAI, and our customers and Engineering teams will look to you for technical guidance in addressing the most technically difficult issues in our environment. You will play an integral role in building knowledge within the team and be part of strategic initiatives for organizational and process improvements. Working directly with our most strategic customers - You will be crucial to the success of the most innovative, disruptive, and high-scale AI solutions being built with the OpenAI platform.
This team will handle high difficulty situations and issues. The team will be global, providing 24x7 technical coverage for our customers. This will be an opportunity to build this new team from first principles - your leadership will determine the future of this organization.
The ideal candidate will have a combination of technical capabilities mixed with strong leadership and systems building strength.
This role is based in Washington, DC. 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:
Build and lead a team of the foremost technical and troubleshooting experts at OpenAI. You are the last line of defense before the core Engineering team.
Partner with engineering and customer teams to build out our systems to ensure that we resolve escalated issues. You will engage with senior leaders internally or with customers and coordinate resources across multiple teams as needed.
Take learnings from resolving customer issues and operationalize those solutions at scale, iterating on internal processes with Engineering/Go-To-Market/vendor partners, influencing product roadmaps, and improving overall customer experience with support.
Manage scaling and operations of the team in order to deliver 24x7 coverage globally, including holidays and weekends based on business needs.
Build strong relationships with our customers to ensure their application’s success.
Ensure the team is assisting broadly where needed beyond the ‘core remit’ of the team
Be a part of the broader leadership team in Support. You will have the opportunity to build not just within this team, but across the organization.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a strong technical background and experience working with U.S. federal government agencies, including leading support for complex technical deployments.
Have 10+ years of experience leading technical support engineering or software engineering teams, ideally in high-scale or fast-paced environments.
Have 15+ years of experience in technical support engineering or software engineering
Have experience leading highly skilled engineering teams and are comfortable empowering senior ICs while setting a clear technical and operational direction.
Bring deep technical experience in application development or infrastructure, paired with a strong instinct for operational systems and customer reliability.
Are a strong cross-functional partner with a proven ability to influence engineering and product roadmaps through support-driven insights.
Take an automation-first approach and have a track record of implementing tooling or processes that scale support impact through AI and systems thinking.
Thrive in ambiguous environments and balance strategic leadership with a willingness to get into technical details when needed.
Are energized by customer impact and excel at building trust with strategic accounts during critical issues or periods of transformation.
Are mission-driven, collaborative, and operate with high integrity and humility.
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.
