Applied AI Engineering Manager, Startups | Core

Location: Hybrid in London, UK; other locations in Munich, Germany and Paris, France.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence.

What you will do

• Define and refine the strategic vision and operating model for the Startups Applied AI Engineering team.
• Lead, mentor, and grow technical individual contributors supporting AI-native, developer-led, and product-led startups.
• Help startups move from experimentation to production by addressing technical blockers, advising on architecture, and driving deployment.
• Partner with Sales to accelerate adoption, production usage, and long-term account growth.
• Represent startup customer needs across developer experience, product gaps, deployment blockers, model performance, and emerging use cases.
• Create repeatable playbooks, starter packs, reference architectures, internal tooling, and customer-facing assets while serving as a senior technical escalation point.

Requirements

• Proven experience founding, scaling, or operating within early-stage startups, ideally in technical leadership roles owning product or customer outcomes and technical execution.
• Strong track record of building and leading technical, customer-facing teams in high-growth, ambiguous, or startup-heavy environments.
• Strong technical depth across APIs, platform products, AI/ML systems, developer workflows, and production deployment considerations.
• Experience creating scalable operating models rather than managing only one-off customer escalations.
• Comfort working directly with founders, CTOs, technical executives, and highly technical individual contributors.
• Strong judgment about when to provide deep strategic-customer engagement versus building repeatable mechanisms for the broader segment.
• Ability to translate complex technical and product considerations into clear decisions, practical guidance, and customer-facing recommendations.
• Ability to operate with speed, iteration, and pragmatic customer impact without sacrificing quality, safety, or OpenAI’s long-term platform strategy.
• Personal commitment to the safe and beneficial development of AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a high-velocity startup customer segment with significant ambiguity and hands-on technical problem-solving.
• Collaborate across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and go-to-market teams.
• Contribute to safe and beneficial AI development and an inclusive equal-opportunity workplace.
• Reasonable accommodations are available for applicants with disabilities; background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.