Strategic Pursuits Lead

ABOUT THE TEAM OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing together world-class scientists, engineers, and business leaders to translate frontier research into real-world impact. Within OpenAI, the Go-to-Market organization helps customers understand, adopt, and scale our products across their businesses. The team includes Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, Partnerships, and Strategic Pursuits professionals who work together to bring the benefits of AI to organizations globally.   ABOUT THE ROLE At OpenAI, we're building toward an agent-first world where AI systems reason, act, transact, and create alongside people and businesses. As agents become a primary interface for work, the Strategic Pursuits Team leads our most complex enterprise opportunities and helps define how customers adopt OpenAI at scale. We're seeking a Strategic Pursuits Lead to shape and close high-impact enterprise opportunities across Frontier, AI Solutions, ChatGPT, Codex, API, and emerging offerings. This person partners with customers, account teams, Product, FDE, Legal, Finance, GTM, and executives to turn ambiguous demand into a clear vision, business case, commercial structure, delivery path, and repeatable GTM motion. This is a builder role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, can operate without a playbook, and is energized by creating the playbook while running the pursuit. The right person brings executive presence, commercial judgment, product intuition, and the ability to make messy work executable. This role can be based in our San Francisco or Seattle offices. We are also considering applications to work remotely from within the U.S. 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: - Lead strategic pursuits from early qualification through customer alignment, proposal, commercial structure, and transition into delivery; define the opportunity, build the business case, align resources, and drive toward a decision. - Build executive-grade customer narratives that translate use cases, technical capabilities, and customer priorities into board-ready value propositions, ROI logic, mutual action plans, and clear deployment paths. - Architect commercial and engagement models across platform, solutions, services, and strategic partnerships, balancing near-term revenue with durable enterprise adoption. - Orchestrate internal alignment across Product, FDE, GTM, Legal, Finance, Ops, and leadership; unblock decisions and ensure the right resources are engaged at the right moments. - Design repeatable pursuit motions by converting first-of-kind deal learnings into playbooks, proposal templates, FAQs, operating models, and field enablement. - Bring customer and market signal back into OpenAI so strategic pursuits shape roadmap priorities, packaging, pricing, partner strategy, and the enterprise playbook. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE - High-priority pursuits become executable deals with clear customer outcomes, executive alignment, commercial logic, resourcing plans, and a path to signature. - The strategic-pursuit playbook scales: qualification, scoping, proposal narrative, ROI/business case, commercial structure, and handoff patterns are reusable by the field. - Cross-functional teams move with urgency because Product, FDE, GTM, Legal, Finance, Ops, and leadership understand the customer ask, decision path, resource needs, and next moves. - Customer learnings improve product, packaging, and GTM by turning first-of-kind pursuit patterns into clearer offers, better resourcing models, and sharper field guidance. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU HAVE: - 10+ years in strategic partnerships, complex enterprise GTM, platform sales, business development, corporate strategy, or strategic deal execution in high-growth technology. - Proven ability to lead high-ambiguity, multi-threaded initiatives where customer vision, product strategy, technical delivery, and commercial structure evolve in parallel. - Strong commercial judgment and experience shaping multi-product, multi-stakeholder, or first-of-kind enterprise deals. - Exceptional at influencing across executive, technical, commercial, and operational audiences, with the judgment to be both connective tissue and decision driver. - Systems thinker who can translate frontier capabilities into practical customer strategies, commercial models, operating motions, and deployment paths. - Deeply aligned with OpenAI's mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, and motivated to turn frontier technology into practical, governed impact at enterprise scale. 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. 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