Principal - Strategic Accounts

About the Company

The OpenAI Deployment Company (“DeployCo”) is the deployment arm of OpenAI, purpose-built to deliver enterprise AI transformation at scale. As model capabilities accelerate, deployment has become the primary constraint to realizing AI value creation within large enterprises. DeployCo bridges that gap.
Our ambition is to build the company that defines AI deployment. We operate at the intersection of cutting-edge AI, enterprise transformation, and scaled services delivery. We partner with enterprise customers to identify where AI can transform their businesses and build solutions leveraging OpenAI’s models and products. We work with many of the world's largest and most influential companies to solve their most complex business challenges using the latest advances in AI.
People who thrive at DeployCo get excited about ambitious and complex work. We are deep believers in the future with AI. We execute quickly, value intellectual honesty, and obsess over the solutions we build for our customers.
DeployCo is being built from the ground up as a subsidiary of OpenAI and funded with a partnership of outside investors.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal - Strategic Accounts to build and grow DeployCo’s most important customer relationships. You will work closely with OpenAI account teams, customer leaders, and DeployCo’s technical teams to understand business priorities, identify transformational applications of AI, and shape engagements that deliver measurable results.
Your focus will be on developing commercial opportunities and relationships: qualifying opportunities, building the business case, coordinating discovery and scoping, and guiding engagements through commercial agreement into deployment. As customers see results, you will help identify where DeployCo can deepen its impact.
This role combines strategic problem-solving, customer partnership, and commercial ownership. Success means shaping high-impact customer engagements, building trusted customer relationships, and growing those relationships through demonstrated value.

In this role you will

• Build relationships with senior enterprise leaders, understanding their priorities, operating constraints, and opportunities for frontier AI deployment
• Partner with OpenAI account teams to understand customer context and develop opportunities introduced to DeployCo
• Lead qualification and discovery, bringing in technical and deployment colleagues to assess feasibility and define scope
• Lead the commercial process with customers, working with legal, finance, and deployment teams, ensuring expectations and commitments are clear
• Bring customer insights back into DeployCo’s approach to qualification, engagement design, and account development

You may thrive in this role if you

• Take ownership in ambiguous environments, moving comfortably between long-term account development and the detail needed to advance an engagement
• Can turn customer ambition into a clear problem, a credible scope, and an actionable next step
• Have shaped and delivered complex customer engagements, bringing together senior stakeholders, technical teams, and commercial considerations
• Build trust with customers by understanding their business, exercising sound judgment, and following through on commitments
• Communicate clearly with senior executives and coordinate effectively across teams with different priorities
• Bring a rigorous quantitative foundation through education or professional experience