Account Director, EMEA Startups

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this.

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 is made of Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals that work together to create valuable solutions that will 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 Startups Go To Market team. You will play a critical role in owning relationships with top startup customers and supporting them in building successfully on the OpenAI platform. You will also build relationships with top venture capital funds and investors in Europe, with the goal of providing exceptional support to the portfolio companies of these funds.

We believe that many of the most disruptive and category-defining AI applications will be created by startups. The Startup Go To Market team’s mission is to help startups harness the power of AI models to drive these advances. You will support startups building effectively with OpenAI’s APIs, and provide access to OpenAI teams and expertise to support their growth.

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 set of strategically important startup customers, as well as working across the OpenAI organization to help these startups accelerate their progress and be successful using our models. You will also serve as the primary representative from our Startups team in building out our presence across the European startup ecosystem. You’ll work cross-functionality with product, research, engineering, marketing, support, and solutions architecture to help customers get the most out of our models.

This role is based in London, United Kingdom. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.

In this role, you'll:

• Manage a portfolio of startups accounts, developing and executing strategies for a comprehensive account plan

• Partner with solutions, research, and engineering to build and execute complex customer programs and projects

• Own a consumption revenue target

• Manage consumption revenue forecasts

• Provide technical guidance to startups in 1:1 engagements, in partnership with internal technical teams

• Manage and develop a set of partner-level relationships with top venture capital funds, startup accelerator programs, and other external partners in the startup ecosystem

• Develop strategies to drive adoption of OpenAI’s models among top venture-backed startups and ensure companies have the resources they need to build quickly and effectively using OpenAI’s models

• Identify opportunities for 1:many engagements and events for founders, and execute in collaboration with VC firms and internal teams

• Represent OpenAI at startup ecosystem events and speaking engagements

• Analyze key metrics within startup portfolios and create reports and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders

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

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

• Contribute to the development of programs and strategic initiatives focused on startup customers

• Closely monitor the industry landscape and startup landscape to contribute to product roadmap and other corporate strategies

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of other teammates

• Support the development of company culture
  

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• Passion for the startup ecosystem and supporting the growth of fast-growing companies

• Experience as a founder of a venture-backed startup (preferably a technical founder), a venture capital investor, or early employee at a fast-growing startup

• Technical understanding of AI technologies and AI product landscape

• 10+ years experience managing high-value external relationships (e.g., customers, partners, investors, Board of Directors) and working directly with founders and C-level executives

• Communicating technical concepts to customers and internal stakeholders

• Leading high-visibility customer engagements (e.g., conferences, 1:many events, product launches, etc.)

• Gathering, distilling, and processing complex market (industry, competitor, customer, prospect) intelligence

• Public speaking ability

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand your customer’s 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 or deep curiosity in artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy our technology in a way that benefits humanity. You’re excited to educate our customers on AI and how to plan for the future.

• Are a builder. You are excited to impact 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 invigorates you. Bespoke issues requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you. You’re willing to experiment with new solutions.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

Compensation, Benefits and Perks

This is a position with OpenAI UK Ltd., which controls the hiring and management of this position. Total compensation includes competitive salary, generous equity and benefits.

• Private medical insurance covering 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents

• Pension plan with 4% employer contribution

• 52 weeks maternity leave and 20 weeks parental leave

• Unlimited time off

• Annual learning & development stipend (£1,200 per year)

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.