---
title: 'Applied AI Delivery Lead at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-delivery-lead-openai-san-francisco-55mrq6krdw3j'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Applied AI Delivery Lead at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $234k–$335k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/afebc24f-c6b8-4c66-a344-b1661fc77570

## Job description

## About the Role

OpenAI’s largest and most strategic customers are turning AI ambition into deployments that change how their organizations work. As a Delivery Lead, you will own delivery of priority AI initiatives for these customers, leading complex, high-impact deployments from planning through launch and adoption.

You’ll establish an integrated delivery plan, drive execution against launch commitments, resolve blockers, and lead progress toward measurable customer value. You’ll partner closely with account and technical teams, FDEs, customers, and delivery partners to turn customer priorities into successful deployments. You’ll bring a clear view of delivery progress, risks, and expected outcomes, helping teams make informed decisions and connecting successful execution to consumption and growth.

This is a senior, customer-facing role for someone who can move between executive conversations and practical details that determine whether a deployment succeeds. You bring technical fluency, sound judgment, and the ability to create clarity and drive action in complex, evolving environments.

## What You’ll Do

- Own delivery of priority AI initiatives. Lead complex customer engagements from scoping and planning through deployment, launch, and initial adoption.
- Build and drive an integrated delivery plan. Establish clear scope, milestones, accountable owners, dependencies, resource needs, and success measures across customer, OpenAI, and partner teams.
- Resolve blockers and drive decisions. Identify risks early, work through dependencies and resource constraints, and bring the right stakeholders together to resolve tradeoffs and keep delivery moving.
- Lead launch readiness and activation. Drive rollout and enablement planning, address technical and organizational readiness gaps, and remove barriers to initial adoption and usage.
- Connect delivery to customer value. Define expected outcomes and measurement approaches with customers and account teams. Track adoption and consumption, assess results against agreed baselines, and communicate the value achieved.
- Provide a clear view of delivery health. Lead customer and internal delivery reviews that drive decisions and action. Communicate progress, launch confidence, risks, and implications for expected consumption and revenue timing.
- Improve how we deliver. Turn customer experience into repeatable playbooks, practical tools, and actionable feedback for product and delivery teams.

## What We’re Looking For

- 7+ years of experience leading complex enterprise technology deployments, customer delivery programs, or transformation initiatives involving multiple teams and partners.
- A track record of driving programs from scope through launch and adoption, with accountability for delivery commitments and measurable customer outcomes.
- Strong technical aptitude, with the ability to understand AI systems, APIs, integrations, enterprise architecture, security dependencies, and deployment risks.
- The ability to translate customer priorities into actionable delivery plans with clear milestones, owners, dependencies, and success measures.
- Strong judgment under ambiguity, including the ability to identify material risks, navigate competing priorities, and drive timely decisions.
- Experience building trust with customers and leading across teams outside your reporting line while holding stakeholders accountable to shared commitments.
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage executives, technical specialists, and customer operators and explain complex delivery issues clearly.
- Commercial awareness and an understanding of how deployment, adoption, and consumption contribute to customer value and growth.
- A practical approach to building repeatable delivery methods while adapting to the needs of individual

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

## Other roles at OpenAI

- [Strategy & Operations Lead — SEA & ANZ](https://feeny.ai/job/strategy-operations-lead-sea-anz-openai-singapore-a6pm94k6qqsy) — Singapore
- [Client Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/client-platform-engineer-openai-san-francisco-pat12pc927cq) — San Francisco, CA
- [Enterprise Security Engineer, Vulnerability Management](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-security-engineer-vulnerability-management-openai-san-francisco-h3ej6emmjazm) — San Francisco, CA
- [Marketplace Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/marketplace-lead-openai-new-york-fhs68bg43ftx) — New York, NY
- [B2B Ecosystem Lead, Business Development](https://feeny.ai/job/b2b-ecosystem-lead-business-development-openai-san-francisco-y31vpy889d0y) — San Francisco, CA
- [Applied AI Engineer, Startups](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-startups-openai-sao-paulo-wgjmry3b90sn) — São Paulo, Brazil
- [Experiential Producer](https://feeny.ai/job/experiential-producer-openai-san-francisco-43m6e9w9k2rh) — San Francisco, CA
- [Creative Director, Art](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-art-openai-san-francisco-m9ce3hvapsfz) — San Francisco, CA
- [Motion Designer, Business Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/motion-designer-business-marketing-openai-san-francisco-gtbt12733436) — San Francisco, CA
- [Creative Delivery Director, Business Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-delivery-director-business-marketing-openai-san-francisco-vb9j81xmyyph) — San Francisco, CA