Support Operations Lead

About the Team The Support team is central to ensuring that our customers' experience with our products is nothing short of exceptional. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from individual customers to early-stage startups and established global enterprises. Given OpenAI’s breakneck shipping cadence and growth – and the expectation that it will only accelerate – our ability to architect automation systems and agentic workflows for scale is central to our ability to maintain exceptional support quality in the face of AGI. About the Role We are seeking a Support Operations Manager who combines operational leadership, systems thinking, vendor management, and hands-on execution. You’ll own service health, automation programs, partner and vendor management. In addition to delivering high-quality service, you’ll identify opportunities to reduce manual work, experiment with tools and help operationalize AI across support at scale. This is not a traditional support operations manager role. We’re looking for someone to help us define the future of support, who thrive at the intersection of team/project management, systems building, data science/engineering, and with deep craft experience in the support operations space. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Lead and evolve organizational design for our frontline operations across partner and vendor management, coaching teams to expand automation and deliver measurable capacity gains. Lead multi-site partner management, including commercial ownership, capacity planning and workforce management, QBRs, and performance recovery. Own end-to-end service governance for partner and vendor teams, including automation rate, cost to serve, first-response time, productivity, and quality. Set standards for how work gets done at scale, replacing one-off fixes with reusable systems. Upskill teams and partner with Automation Engineering, Support Engineering, and Fraud & Risk to embed LLM-powered tools into frontline workflows. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 8+ years of experience leading support operations teams and a strong track record of coaching, driving accountability, and improving performance and automation adoption at scale Are comfortable managing a team while staying hands-on in solving ambiguous operational problems. Are fluent in operational data and technical collaboration, able to define metrics, interpret dashboards, design experiments, and partner with engineering and data teams to turn ambiguous support problems into scalable systems. Think in systems, using process design, data, tooling, and automation to reduce manual work and create durable capacity. Can partner credibly with technical teams and translate support needs into clear requirements, owning problem definition, adoption, change management, and operational outcomes Are energized by building structure in a high-growth environment where the support model, tooling, and partner strategy are still evolving. Have scaled support operations through organizational design and tooling in a high-growth technology company without compromising quality. 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 w