Applied AI Delivery Lead - San Francisco

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. 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 O