---
title: 'Federal Account Director, National Security at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/federal-account-director-national-security-openai-washington-r62gkyh8ztjm'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-24'
---

# Federal Account Director, National Security at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** Washington, DC
- **Compensation:** $261k–$335k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-24
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/dc0b907b-f833-4559-8fd8-d3d4c80b58d8/application

**Skills:** Government contracting, Security clearances, Procurement processes, SaaS, PaaS

> Drive sales and manage key accounts within the U.S. Defense and Intelligence Community, helping national security customers adopt AI solutions. Requires deep industry experience, strategic vision, and a Top Secret clearance to navigate complex government procurement processes.

## Job description

## About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this. In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their organization. The team comprises Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals who collaborate to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

## About the role

Our Government Sales team has a unique mission to help national security customers understand the transformative impact that highly capable AI models can bring to their critical missions. This role combines technical understanding, strategic vision, partnership management, and value-driven strategy specifically tailored to Defense and Intelligence Community customers. You’ll drive key opportunities through the entire defense sales cycle, from pipeline generation to closure. You’ll collaborate closely with researchers, engineers, and solution strategists to help customers within the Defense and Intelligence Communities advance their national security missions through AI. 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'll:

- Manage a focused set of key U.S. Defense and Intelligence Community accounts, developing and executing comprehensive account plans
- Lead Defense and Intelligence customers through their AI adoption journey, from consideration to successful deployment
- Partner with solutions and research engineering to build and execute complex defense customer programs and projects
- Own and manage a National Security Community consumption revenue target
- Oversee revenue forecasting and reporting
- Analyze key Defense and Intelligence account metrics and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders
- Closely monitor the national security landscape (agencies, policies, competitors, partners, etc.) to inform product roadmaps and corporate strategies
- Collaborate cross-functionally with solutions, product engineering, government affairs, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering
- Support the recruitment and onboarding of team members focused on defense and intelligence accounts
- Foster the development of our company culture within the National Security Community practice

We're seeking someone with experience including:

- 10+ years selling commercial technology (platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, etc.) specifically to the National Security Community
- Top Secret clearance
- Designing and executing complex deal strategies within Defense or National Security contexts, including familiarity with government contracting, security clearances, and procurement processes
- Supporting growth in fast-paced, high-performance National Security environments
- Working directly with senior National Security executives and decision-makers. We are prioritizing candidates with deep relationships and native familiarity with defense and intelligence workflows.
- Communicating technical and strategic concepts clearly to National Security customers and internal stakeholders
- Leading high-visibility National Security customer events, briefings, and industry engagements
- Gathering, distilling, and processing detailed Defense and Intelligence Community market intelligence (agency priorities, policy changes, competitor activities, etc.)

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand defense customers’ priorities and help them achieve their mission-critical objectives using AI. You build trusted relationships with senior executives and stakeholders across defense and national security agencies.
- Have a passion or deep curiosity about artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy OpenAI’s technology in ways that advance national security missions and benefit humanity. You’re enthusiastic about educating defense customers on AI capabilities and strategic implications.
- Are a builder. You enjoy impacting how our company grows its defense and intelligence business. You excel in establishing robust systems and processes tailored to defense customer requirements, executing them with precision and agility.
- Are excited by new challenges. You thrive when solving complex, mission-critical defense and national security problems. Bespoke challenges requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you, and you’re eager to experiment with innovative solutions within national security environments.
- Are a strategist. You deeply understand defense go-to-market best practices and proactively contribute to strategic initiatives. You plan years ahead, effectively aligning internal and external defense and intelligence stakeholders to achieve long-term

## 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/)

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