Account Director, Startups

About OpenAI

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 business. The team is made up of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals who work together to create valuable solutions that help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Account Director to join our Startups Go To Market team. You will play a critical role in owning relationships with top startup customers and supporting them in building successfully on the OpenAI platform.

We believe that many of the most disruptive and category-defining AI applications will be created by startups. The Startup Go To Market team’s mission is to help startups harness the power of AI models to drive these advances.

You will support startups building effectively with OpenAI’s APIs and provide access to OpenAI teams and expertise to support their growth.

This role combines technical understanding, vision, partnership, and strategy. You’ll serve as the primary relationship owner for a set of strategically important startup customers while working across the OpenAI organisation to help these startups accelerate their progress and succeed using our models.

You’ll work cross-functionally with Product, Research, Engineering, Support, and Solutions Architecture to help customers get the most out of our models.

Location: This role is based in Munich or Berlin. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

What You’ll Do

• Manage a portfolio of startup accounts, developing and executing strategies for comprehensive account plans.
• Partner with Solutions and Research Engineering to build and execute complex customer programmes and projects.
• Own a consumption revenue target.
• Manage consumption revenue forecasts.
• Analyse key account metrics to create reports and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.
• Closely monitor the industry and startup landscape, including people, competitors, and partners, to contribute to product roadmaps and broader corporate strategies.
• Collaborate with Solutions, Marketing, Communications, Business Operations, People Operations, Finance, Product Management, and Engineering.
• Serve as an advocate for improving the startup experience of building with OpenAI, synthesising product feedback and insights captured through our work with startups.
• Support the recruitment and onboarding of other teammates.
• Support the continued development of company culture.

Experience We’re Looking For

• 6+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service.
• Experience designing and executing complex deal strategies.
• Experience working in or around the startup ecosystem, preferably as a startup founder, startup employee, or someone who has worked closely with startup customers.
• Experience supporting the growth of fast-growing, high-performance companies.
• Experience working directly with C-level executives.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts effectively to customers and internal stakeholders.
• Experience leading high-visibility customer events, such as CABs, conferences, and product launches.
• Experience gathering, distilling, and processing complex market intelligence across industries, competitors, customers, and prospects.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Are customer-centric: You are motivated to deeply understand your customers’ priorities and help them achieve their vision for using our models to improve their products and services. You build strong relationships with executives and professionals across functions and serve as a trusted advisor.
• Have a passion or deep curiosity for artificial intelligence: You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate customers on AI and how to plan for the future.
• Are a builder: You’re excited to impact how our company operates and scales. Your passion is building strong systems and processes from the ground up and executing them with precision.
• Are excited by new challenges: You don’t have the answers to every question upfront, but the process of solving them invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you, and you’re willing to experiment with new solutions.
• Are a strategist: You deeply understand go-to-market best practices and raise the bar for our organisation. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

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.

To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

Equal Employment Opportunity

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background Checks

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with applicable 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 certain job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment.

These duties may include protecting company computer hardware from theft, loss, or damage; returning company hardware and associated data upon termination or the end of an assignment; maintaining the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information; and accessing secure and protected information technology systems subject to related data security obligations.

Accommodations and Applicant Information

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made through the designated accommodation process.

OpenAI maintains a Global Applicant Privacy Policy governing the handling of applicant information.

Join OpenAI

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.