Strategic Delivery Lead, Critical Infrastructure

About the team The OpenAI for Government team is a mission-driven group bringing frontier AI to public-sector and national security missions. We partner with government agencies and their industry counterparts to apply OpenAI’s API and enterprise products to high-priority challenges, with careful attention to security, privacy, reliability, and responsible use. In this role, you will help government agencies, infrastructure owners and operators, and technology partners apply frontier AI to strengthen critical infrastructure security and resilience. You will connect technical teams and mission leaders to develop practical applications for cyber defense and operational preparedness across sectors such as energy, water, healthcare, financial services, and the defense industrial base. We accelerate adoption through hands-on support, tailored enablement, and measurable outcomes while preserving human judgment and protecting sensitive information. About the Role The Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL) for Critical Infrastructure will identify, shape, and deliver OpenAI’s highest-impact engagements supporting the security and resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure. You will help government and industry partners translate priorities—including cyber defense, vulnerability management, incident preparedness and response, infrastructure risk analysis, and operational coordination—into secure, technically feasible AI deployments. This role sits at the intersection of technical delivery, public-private collaboration, and national cyber strategy. You will work with federal agencies, infrastructure operators, and technology providers to define shared goals and turn promising pilots into sustainable operational capabilities. Internally, you will partner with Research, Engineering, Go-to-Market, Security, Legal, Privacy, and other teams to align scope, resolve delivery obstacles, and communicate progress from working teams to senior leadership. You will own end-to-end execution of delivery workstreams with Forward Deployed Engineers, Researchers, Solutions Architects, and Enablement teams. You will establish outcomes, requirements, roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria; coordinate integration, evaluation, security review, and rollout; and remain accountable for contractual milestones, delivery governance, and measurable customer value. This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires technical fluency, strong program leadership, executive presence, and sound judgment about deploying AI in environments where service continuity and public trust matter. In this role, you will: Build trusted relationships with government mission owners, cyber leaders, sector risk management agencies, infrastructure owners and operators, and technology partners to identify and prioritize high-value AI applications. Own complex engagements from discovery and solution shaping through pilot, security review, deployment, customer acceptance, and sustained adoption. Establish delivery roadmaps, integrated schedules, risk tracking, decision processes, and customer reporting. Translate critical infrastructure missions, cyber risks, policy requirements, data constraints, and operating conditions into clear technical requirements, delivery plans, and executive communications. Develop public-private delivery efforts with federal cyber agencies, sector partners, cloud providers, and cybersecurity companies. Align organizations with different incentives, resources, and definitions of success around shared operational outcomes. Lead delivery of AI capabilities supporting defensive workflows such as vulnerability discovery and prioritization, secure software development, threat analysis, incident response, and infrastructure risk assessment, partnering with technical and operational experts on design, evaluation, and execution. Coordinate deployment requirements across government and enterprise environments, including sensitive or restricted networks where appropriate. Address data handling, identity and access controls, integration dependencies, and customer security requirements. Work with security, privacy, legal, and operational stakeholders to establish evaluations, human oversight, adversarial testing, and ongoing monitoring appropriate to each use case, including potential effects on operational technology and essential services. Define and track measures of customer value, including user adoption, model quality, operational readiness, time saved, and improvements in defensive effectiveness. Bring insight from customers and partners back to Research, Product, and Engineering to inform capability development and deployment priorities. Anticipate technical, operational, contractual, and partnership risks and resolve delivery tradeoffs. Support opportunity qualification, proposal development, and statements of work with Account Directors and partners. Define a practical path from pilot to sustained adoption, including operatio