Strategy & Operations Manager, Support

About the Team

The User Operations team (Support) 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 early-stage startups to established global enterprises.

About the Role

We are seeking a senior strategy and operations leader to build, lead, and scale the Strategy & Operations function within OpenAI's User Operations organization. In this role, you will manage a high-impact team of strategy and operations practitioners while owning the service strategy, planning, and execution mechanisms that underpin our customer support operations.

You will be accountable for how User Operations scales - designing and evolving our support model, forecasting and planning for growth, and ensuring we have the right capacity, capabilities, and operating rhythm to meet user needs as OpenAI's products and footprint expand rapidly. This role acts as the connective tissue between strategy, planning, and execution, and as a force multiplier for User Operations leadership.

You'll be responsible for deeply understanding our existing support strategy and operating model, quickly gaining context on where we are and where we're going - and then running with it, pressure-testing it, and evolving it as needed. This is not a role focused on documenting or maintaining playbooks. AI has fundamentally changed the customer experience and the nature of support operations; this role requires a leader who can define future-state service models, anticipate second- and third-order impacts of scale, and continuously adapt our operating approach.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and develop the Strategy & Operations team within User Operations, setting clear direction, priorities, and quality bars, while raising the operational and strategic maturity of the org.

• Own Service Strategy for User Operations, including support model design, tiering and entitlements, and the evolution of our end-to-end customer experience.

• Own forecasting and capacity planning for User Operations, partnering closely with Finance and Data teams to translate demand signals into headcount, vendor strategy, tooling investments, and operating plans.

• Serve as a strategic partner to User Operations leadership, helping define long-term direction while ensuring near-term priorities are executed against with rigor and accountability.

• Drive AI-native operations across User Operations, embedding LLMs and automation into service strategy, workforce models, tooling, and decision-making. Technology is not an adjunct here - it is foundational to how we design support.

• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Data leaders to identify and solve the most critical scaling challenges in support, including deflection strategy, self-service expansion, tooling evolution, and operational quality.

• Bring structure to ambiguity and momentum to execution, establishing program structure, decision frameworks, and operating rhythms that allow teams to move quickly without losing coherence.

• Lead deep, analytical dives into the core drivers of support performance, including volume, handle time, backlog, SLA risk, cost-to-serve, automation efficacy, and customer experience signals.

• Own change management for major operational shifts, ensuring new strategies, service models, and systems are adopted effectively across internal teams and external partners.

• Act as a senior escalation and alignment point across the org, connecting strategy, planning, and execution, and ensuring leadership has clarity into progress, risks, and tradeoffs.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of work experience in customer support operations and/or a strategy & ops function, with deep, hands-on experience running and scaling support organizations, and prior people-management responsibility.

• Bring a strong, opinionated point of view on customer support operations, including service strategy, workforce planning, automation strategy, and operating cadence - and can quickly adapt that perspective to OpenAI's unique context.

• Have led forecasting, capacity planning, and annual planning in complex, high-growth environments, with comfort operating under significant uncertainty and imperfect data.

• Operate comfortably at all altitudes, from executive-level strategy conversations to detailed discussions on queue dynamics, SLAs, routing logic, and agent performance.

• Have a proven track record of owning large, ambiguous problem spaces end-to-end, translating them into clear priorities, executable plans, and measurable outcomes.

• Have a deep passion for AI, technology, and customer experience, and are energized by the opportunity to redefine how customer support operates at a global scale.

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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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.

Compensation Range: $310K