--- title: 'Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives) at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-applied-ai-engineering-digital-natives-openai-san-francisco-xkz70w6acxpt' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives) at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $302k–$335k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-26 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ba2ead69-d118-4a91-a4d7-c880d17fa7f9/application **Skills:** Generative AI, Machine Learning, Cloud Architecture, Network Architecture, Python, JavaScript > Lead the AI Deployment Engineering team to ensure the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications for enterprise customers. Manage the entire implementation journey, align technical teams with customer needs, and serve as the primary technical advocate and escalation point for production success. ## Job description ## About the Team The Applied AI Engineering team partners closely with customers to help them turn frontier AI capabilities into real products, workflows, and business impact. We act as trusted technical partners across strategy, solution design, architecture, implementation, evaluation, and adoption, working alongside customers to build and scale effective AI applications with OpenAI’s technologies. The Digital Natives segment serves technology and software companies that are building AI into the core of their products and businesses. These customers are often highly technical, move quickly, and are among the earliest adopters of OpenAI’s newest capabilities. Our Applied AI Engineers work directly with their engineering, product, and technical leadership teams to identify high-impact opportunities, solve complex technical challenges, and bring ambitious AI applications into production. ## About the Role We are seeking a Manager, Applied AI Engineering (Digital Natives) to lead the team responsible for the technical success of our most strategic technology and software customers in the Americas. In this role, you will lead a team of Applied AI Engineers who work hands-on with customers to design, build, evaluate, and scale AI applications. You will help determine where deep technical partnership can unlock the greatest customer and business impact, while developing repeatable approaches that allow the team to support a broad and fast-moving customer segment. As a manager, you will set the strategy and operating model for the team, coach and develop engineers, and serve as a senior technical partner to customers and internal stakeholders. You will work closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, and Research to connect what we learn from customers with OpenAI’s product direction and help customers take advantage of our newest capabilities. Success in this role will be measured by meaningful production applications, sustained adoption and usage, strong customer outcomes, and technical patterns and insights that can be applied across the broader Digital Natives segment. This role is open in our San Francisco office. 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 - Own the strategy and operating model for the Digital Natives Applied AI Engineering team, ensuring alignment with OpenAI’s objectives and the evolving needs of technology and software customers. - Lead, hire, mentor, and develop a team of high-performing Applied AI Engineers responsible for delivering meaningful technical and customer outcomes. - Guide the team in working hands-on with customers to identify high-impact use cases, design and build AI applications, solve technical challenges, and scale successful solutions into production. - Partner closely with Sales to prioritize technical engagement across strategic customers and identify where Applied AI Engineering can unlock adoption, usage, and long-term customer growth. - Serve as a senior technical partner and escalation point for priority customers, building trusted relationships with engineering leaders, CTOs, and other executive stakeholders. - Represent the technical voice of Digital Native customers by synthesizing insights around model performance, developer experience, product gaps, emerging use cases, and technical blockers for Product, Engineering, and Research. - Translate recurring customer needs and successful implementations into repeatable technical patterns, reference architectures, playbooks, tooling, and best practices that allow the team to scale its impact. - Coach Applied AI Engineers on technical quality, customer judgment, prioritization, executive communication, and cross-functional partnership. - Help customers understand and apply OpenAI’s newest capabilities, identifying opportunities to build differentiated products and experiences with frontier models. - Champion the safe, reliable, and effective application of OpenAI’s technology across the Digital Natives ecosystem. You’ll Thrive in This Role If You - Have 8+ years of experience in deeply technical, customer-facing roles such as applied engineering, solutions architecture, deployment engineering, technical consulting, or similar roles. - Have 2+ years of experience leading technical teams, with a demonstrated ability to hire, develop, mentor, and manage high-performing engineers. - Have experience building or deploying generative AI, machine learning, developer platforms, or cloud-based software solutions in production environments. - Bring strong technical depth across APIs, AI/ML systems, application architecture, cloud infrastructure, and modern developer workflows. - Have hands-on software engineering experience and fluency with programming languages such as Python or JavaScript. - Are comfortable working directly with highly technical engineering and product teams as well as CTOs and other executive stakeholders. - Can translate ambiguous customer and business problems into clear technical approaches and guide teams from exploration through implementation and production. - Demonstrate strong judgment about when to invest deeply in an individual customer challenge versus when to develop a repeatable solution for the broader segment. - Are an effective communicator who can translate complex technical and business topics across audiences and coach others to do the same. - Thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and are energized by working with customers at the forefront of AI adoption. - Demonstrate strong ownership, humility, curiosity, and a commitment to helping both customers and teammates succeed. - Are personally committed to fostering the safe and beneficial development of AI. ## 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 - [Account Director, Digital Natives](https://feeny.ai/job/account-director-digital-natives-openai-delhi-w85camznm9da) — Delhi, India - [Product Designer, Youth](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-youth-openai-san-francisco-y2ejwx2gxsn1) — San Francisco, CA - [Senior Manager, EHS - Robotics](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-manager-ehs-robotics-openai-san-francisco-562ppxrm3e6n) — San Francisco, CA - [Hardware Strategic Sourcing Manager, Optics](https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-strategic-sourcing-manager-optics-openai-san-francisco-vrghp3x83twa) — San Francisco, CA - [Research Program Manager, Governance](https://feeny.ai/job/research-program-manager-governance-openai-san-francisco-t9jpag8tgexs) — San Francisco, CA - [Partnerships Operations Lead, OAI for Government](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-operations-lead-oai-for-government-openai-washington-vzejrcam99mr) — Washington, DC - [Technical Program Manager, Manufacturing Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/technical-program-manager-manufacturing-operations-openai-singapore-2px9t2t2dyvy) — Singapore - [Creative Director, Copy](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-copy-openai-new-york-jd7jgsad5xr4) — New York, NY - [Engineering Manager, ChatGPT Search Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-chatgpt-search-infrastructure-openai-san-francisco-hh32vszf6wmn) — San Francisco, CA - [Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering](https://feeny.ai/job/physical-design-engineer-forward-deployed-engineering-openai-san-francisco-qqh4c31zzvj5) — San Francisco, CA