Account Director, Government Scale

About the Team

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Our OpenAI for Government team helps public-sector organizations understand, adopt, and deploy highly capable AI products in support of their missions. The team brings together Sales, Solutions, Partnerships, Technical Success, Legal, Policy, and other cross-functional partners to help government customers use AI responsibly and effectively.

About the Role

We are looking for an Account Director to help build and run our scaled sales motion for federal, state, and local government customers. You will be a first point of contact for government organizations exploring OpenAI, own a portfolio of smaller and mid-sized agencies, and help customers navigate the path from initial interest through a successful commercial engagement.

This is a full-cycle sales role. You will qualify inbound demand, create new opportunities, perform targeted outbound outreach, coordinate with resellers and strategic partners, and independently close a defined class of opportunities. You will also recognize when an opportunity should graduate to a senior Account Director and make that transition seamless for the customer.

This role is ideal for a seller who combines strong discovery and closing skills with the operational discipline to build a new motion. You will help OpenAI respond to government demand at scale while ensuring that every customer receives clear, accurate, and thoughtful guidance.

This role is based in Washington DC or San Francisco. 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:

• Own inbound response, discovery, qualification, follow-up, and disposition for an assigned set of federal, state, and local government customers.

• Manage a portfolio of smaller and mid-sized agencies and lead appropriate opportunities through the full sales cycle.

• Create pipeline through targeted outbound outreach and multithreading within priority government accounts and cohorts.

• Build trusted relationships with government stakeholders, understand their missions and constraints, and connect them to relevant OpenAI capabilities.

• Work closely with approved resellers, AWS, and other strategic partners to advance customer opportunities and navigate purchasing paths.

• Partner with Solutions Engineering, Technical Success, Legal, Policy, Security, and other internal teams on technical, procurement, compliance, and deployment questions.

• Identify larger or more complex strategic opportunities and transition them effectively to the appropriate senior Account Director.

• Maintain accurate pipeline, forecasting, customer follow-up, and account records.

• Develop repeatable playbooks for government inbound, qualification, routing, reseller execution, and common customer questions.

• Surface recurring customer, product, procurement, and partner insights to improve OpenAI's government go-to-market motion.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have approximately 4-7 years of relevant B2B SaaS, cloud, or technical sales experience, including demonstrated full-cycle closing ownership.

• Have run strong discovery, built credible deal strategies, navigated multiple stakeholders, and independently closed smaller or mid-market opportunities.

• Can manage a high-volume portfolio without sacrificing customer experience, judgment, or follow-through.

• Communicate complex technical and commercial concepts clearly to working-level and executive audiences.

• Are curious about AI and can quickly learn how OpenAI's products create value, where they may not be a fit, and how to discuss tradeoffs responsibly.

• Operate with high ownership, strong prioritization, and comfort in a fast-changing environment.

• Enjoy building processes, documenting playbooks, and improving how a team works.

Helpful experience

• Selling to federal, state, local, education, or other regulated public-sector customers.

• Working with government resellers, contract vehicles, cloud marketplaces, systems integrators, or strategic technology partners.

• Navigating public-sector procurement, compliance, security, data-residency, or accessibility requirements.

• Building a new inside-sales, scaled-account, territory, or cohort-based sales motion.

Success in this role

Success will be measured through closed customer outcomes, qualified pipeline, response and conversion quality, forecast discipline, effective opportunity handoffs, and the repeatable operating leverage you create for the broader OpenAI for Government sales team.

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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