Head of Technical Success, Government

About the team The OpenAI for Government team partners with federal, state, local, defense, national security, and international public-sector organizations to securely and responsibly adopt frontier AI, strengthen public services, and deliver meaningful mission impact. About the role OpenAI is seeking a strategic and deeply technical leader to serve as the Head of Government Technical Success. This leader will oversee the technical functions across the government customer lifecycle, spanning pre-sales engagement, prototype-to-production delivery, and post-sales adoption and value realization. You will define and operate a unified technical success strategy across federal civilian, defense and national security, state and local, international public sector, and industry partners. Your mission is to help customers identify the highest value applications of OpenAI’s technology, navigate the technical and organizational requirements of government environments, move those applications into production, and scale adoption in ways that deliver measurable mission impact. This role combines organizational leadership, technical judgment, executive customer engagement, operating rigor, and product influence. You will partner closely with Government Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, Legal, Global Affairs and Policy, and other teams to ensure a seamless customer experience for governments in the United States and around the world. This role is based in Washington, DC. We offer relocation support to new employees. In this role, you will Set and continuously refine the strategy, operating model, and priorities for Government Technical Success, aligning the organization to OpenAI’s broader objectives and the distinct needs of government customers. Build and lead an organization of technical success personnel, including hiring, organizational design, manager development, career growth, and high standards for technical and customer-facing excellence. Create a seamless technical journey for government customers, including discovery and technical qualification through architecture, prototyping, production deployment, enablement, adoption, and ongoing value realization. Partner with Government Sales and account leaders on technical strategy, account planning, resource allocation, and engagement models, enabling the team to focus its deepest support on the opportunities with the greatest mission value and strategic importance. Serve as a technical executive sponsor for OpenAI’s most strategic government and partner relationships. Build trust with senior mission leaders, CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, technical teams, and other key government stakeholders. Guide internal teams and customers through the realities of government deployment, including security, privacy, identity, data handling, governance, accessibility, integration, compliance, procurement, accreditation, and change management requirements. Ensure customers can successfully evaluate, configure, integrate, deploy, and adopt OpenAI products in the appropriate government environments, including ChatGPT Enterprise, Codex, the OpenAI API, and emerging capabilities. Establish clear measures of technical success across the customer lifecycle, including technical qualification, deployment velocity and quality, production use, activation and sustained adoption, account health, renewal and expansion, customer satisfaction, and demonstrated mission outcomes. Scale the organization’s impact through reusable playbooks, reference architectures, demos, prototypes, workshops, training, community resources, implementation patterns, and partner enablement. Develop strong operating partnerships with systems integrators, cloud and technology partners, and implementation teams that help government customers move from experimentation to durable production deployments. Represent the technical voice of government customers by synthesizing field patterns, use cases, blockers, product gaps, and emerging requirements into feedback for Product, Engineering, Research, Security, and Policy teams. Anticipate customer and market challenges, intervene directly on critical engagements, and bring clarity to ambiguous or high-stakes situations. Champion a customer-first and mission-first culture that pairs urgency with safety, responsibility, public trust, and long-term stewardship. You’ll thrive in this role if you Bring 10+ years of experience with public sector customers and have a strong track record of building and leading multidisciplinary technical customer-facing organizations across the full customer lifecycle, including developing and leading managers. Have led leaders and high-performing technical teams through periods of rapid growth, ambiguity, and organizational change, and can create clarity without adding unnecessary process. Bring deep technical acumen in AI and platform technologies, with credibility across model behavior and limitations, APIs and SDKs, agentic systems, retrieval