Account Director - Startups

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one organization.

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 includes Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnerships 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 Startup Go-To-Market team. You will play a critical role in owning relationships with top startup customers and supporting them in successfully building on the OpenAI platform.

Many of the most disruptive and category-defining AI applications are being created by startups. The Startup Go-To-Market team's mission is to help startups harness the power of OpenAI’s technology to drive these advances. You will support startups in building effectively with OpenAI’s APIs, SDKs, and applications while providing access to OpenAI’s technical expertise and networks to help accelerate their progress.

This role is a mixture of technical understanding, vision, partnership, and strategy. You’ll be responsible for serving as the primary relationship owner for a range of strategically important startup customers. You’ll also work cross-functionally with product, research, engineering, support, and technical solutions teams to help customers get the most out of our models.

This role will be based in Tokyo.

In this role, you'll:

• Manage a portfolio of startup accounts, developing and executing strategies for comprehensive account management.

• Partner with AI Deployment Engineers to drive successful technical engagements with startups.

• Own consumption and contracted revenue targets while managing revenue forecasts.

• Analyze key account metrics to create reports and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.

• Collaborate with solutions, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering teams.

• Serve as an advocate for improving the startup experience of building with OpenAI, synthesizing product feedback from insights gathered through our work with startups.

• Closely monitor the industry and startup landscapes and contribute to corporate strategy.

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of teammates.

• Support the development of company culture.

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• 7–12 years of experience selling platform-as-a-service (PaaS), cloud, or other API products.

• Experience working in or around the startup ecosystem, preferably as a startup founder, startup employee, or someone who has worked closely with startup customers.

• Supporting the growth and product development of fast-growing, high-performing companies.

• Working directly with C-level executives and startup founders.

• Communicating technical concepts to customers and internal stakeholders.

• 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 for or deep curiosity about artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in ways that benefit humanity. You’re excited to educate customers on AI and help them plan for the future.

• Are a builder. You are excited to influence 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 up front, but the process of solving them energizes you. You enjoy tackling bespoke issues that require multidimensional thinking and are willing to experiment with new solutions.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go-to-market best practices and continually raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan years ahead 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, 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 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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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