Data Scientist - Cloud Distribution & Growth

About the Team

Cloud service providers give developers a way to use OpenAI models in the environments where they already build and run software. Our team works with Go-to-Market (GTM), Product, Engineering, and Finance to understand which customers we can reach through these providers and what helps them grow from a first API call to a production workload.

About the Role

In your first few months, you’ll identify a customer segment or workload where OpenAI can grow, recommend an investment to GTM, Product, and Engineering, and define how we’ll know whether it brought new usage to OpenAI. Your first priority will be to explain what drives usage and revenue across providers. You’ll use that understanding to help GTM decide which customers and workloads to invest in and to build forecasts the team can plan against.

A customer might sign a substantial cloud commitment and send very little traffic. You can sit down with the account team, trace the customer’s first requests, and work out whether they need help launching, access to a different model, or more capacity. When you see the same opportunity across customers, your work can change where OpenAI invests.

In This Role, You Will:

• Build a reliable view of the business from provider usage reports, billing records, and API logs. Show how new workloads, expansion, changes in price, and shifts in model mix contribute to growth.

• Estimate how much demand cloud distribution adds to OpenAI. Trace customer activity across channels to distinguish new use cases from traffic that moved from the direct API.

• Identify where customers are ready to scale. Combine what account teams hear with evidence on request failures, latency, and model availability. Work with Product and Engineering on a change and measure what happens to usage.

• Shape growth plans with GTM and Finance. Estimate what existing workloads and upcoming launches can contribute by year end, test the assumptions that matter most, and recommend where to focus with each provider.

• Own the consumption forecast. Compare forecasts with actual usage over the same period, explain the biggest misses, and use what you learn to improve the next forecast.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You:

• Like questions that take you from a conversation with an account team to a query about a single API request. You’re curious about why a customer’s behavior differs from what the numbers first suggest.

• Are comfortable making a recommendation while some questions are still open. You can tell a sales leader where you’d invest and explain to an engineer what evidence would change your mind.

Qualifications

• Experience independently leading data science work on a product, growth, or commercial question that changed a business decision.

• Strong SQL and Python skills. You can join incomplete datasets, choose the right unit of analysis, and validate an aggregate result against individual customers or workloads.

• Experience using cohorts, experiments, or observational comparisons to assess what drove a change. You can explain how customer selection affects the conclusion and evaluate a forecast against a simple baseline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with API platforms, cloud marketplaces, enterprise GTM, or a usage-based business.

• Experience connecting service reliability or capacity to customer adoption, or using demand forecasts to guide a commercial or infrastructure investment.

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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