Senior Support Engineer, Lead

About the Team

The Senior Support Engineering team is responsible for ensuring that developers and enterprises can reliably build mission critical solutions using OpenAI models. We provide technical guidance, resolve complex issues and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our highly-capable models. We work closely with Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. We think from an automation-first mindset and leverage the latest in AI to scale our support operations. Join the Senior Support Engineering (SSE) team at OpenAI and help shape the future of Technical Support in the age of AI.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Support Engineering Lead to build and guide a high-performing team of experienced Senior Support Engineers with backgrounds in software engineering, site reliability engineering, and systems architecture. These engineers are trusted to operate with autonomy, tackle deeply technical challenges, and serve as the final escalation point before Engineering.

In this role, you'll lead a global team focused on deep problem-solving, proactive reliability work, and customer-specific troubleshooting. You’ll drive the design and operations of OpenAI’s incident management processes, including tooling, automations, and training, and ensure they are scalable and resilient. You’ll also oversee strategic customer workload monitoring, alerting, and a 24x7 rotation to ensure high-priority issues are caught early and handled with urgency.

You’ll collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Technical Success, and field teams to improve the supportability of our products, reduce operational burden, and shape the future of AI-driven technical support. Your team will own incident response playbooks, build internal automations, and serve as technical stewards for our most strategic accounts.

This is an opportunity to define what world-class technical support looks like in the era of AGI. We're looking for a leader who combines strong technical depth with operational rigor, a passion for team development, and an automation-first mindset.

The ideal candidate will have a combination of technical capabilities mixed with strong leadership and systems building strength.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. 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 deeply technical and tenured Senior Support Engineers who bring backgrounds in software engineering, site reliability engineering, and systems architecture and are experts in diagnosing and solving complex issues on OpenAI’s technologies.

• Own the design and continuous improvement of our incident management processes, including tooling, automation, and team readiness.

• Lead strategic workload health monitoring and alerting programs for key enterprise customers, ensuring effective 24x7 operational coverage.

• Guide the team in designing and implementing automation and internal tools with an AI-first mindset to scale support operations efficiently.

• Collaborate closely with Engineering, Product, and Go-To-Market teams to escalate, resolve, and prevent high-impact technical issues.

• Represent Support Engineering in customer conversations and internal forums, driving clarity and alignment on issue resolution and reliability expectations.

• Shape support operations at scale by contributing to team structure, hiring plans, and global shift coverage as we expand.

• Play an active role in the broader Support leadership team, contributing to strategy, operations, and culture beyond your immediate team.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 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.

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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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.