Government Account Director, Defense

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 organization. The team comprises Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals who collaborate to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the role

Our Government Sales team has a unique mission to help national security customers understand the transformative impact that highly capable AI models can bring to their critical missions. This role combines technical understanding, strategic vision, partnership management, and value-driven strategy specifically tailored to Defense Community customers.

You’ll drive key opportunities through the entire defense sales cycle, from pipeline generation to closure. You’ll collaborate closely with researchers, engineers, and solution strategists to help customers within the Defense Community advance their national security missions through AI.

This role is based in Washington DC. 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'll:

• Manage a focused set of key Defense Community accounts, developing and executing comprehensive account plans.

• Lead defense customers through their AI adoption journey, from consideration to successful deployment.

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

• Own and manage a Defense Community consumption revenue target.

• Oversee revenue forecasting and reporting.

• Analyze key defense account metrics and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.

• Closely monitor the defense and national security landscape (agencies, policies, competitors, partners, etc.) to inform product roadmaps and corporate strategies.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with solutions, product engineering, government affairs, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering.

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of team members focused on defense and intelligence accounts.

• Foster the development of our company culture within the Defense Community practice.

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• 10+ years selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service specifically into Defense accounts.

• Top Secret clearance.

• Achieving defense revenue targets of >$2M per year consistently over multiple years.

• Designing and executing complex deal strategies within Defense or National Security contexts, including familiarity with government contracting, security clearances, and procurement processes.

• Supporting growth in fast-paced, high-performance Defense Community environments.

• Working directly with senior defense executives and decision-makers.

• Communicating technical and strategic concepts clearly to defense customers and internal stakeholders.

• Leading high-visibility defense customer events, briefings, and industry engagements.

• Gathering, distilling, and processing detailed Defense Community market intelligence (agency priorities, policy changes, competitor activities, etc.). 

You might thrive in this role if you: 

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand defense customers’ priorities and help them achieve their mission-critical objectives using AI. You build trusted relationships with senior executives and stakeholders across defense and national security agencies.

• Have a passion or deep curiosity about artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy OpenAI’s technology in ways that advance national security missions and benefit humanity. You’re enthusiastic about educating defense customers on AI capabilities and strategic implications.

• Are a builder. You enjoy impacting how our company grows its defense and intelligence business. You excel in establishing robust systems and processes tailored to defense customer requirements, executing them with precision and agility.

• Are excited by new challenges. You thrive when solving complex, mission-critical defense and national security problems. Bespoke challenges requiring multidimensional knowledge excite you, and you’re eager to experiment with innovative solutions within national security environments.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand defense go-to-market best practices and proactively contribute to strategic initiatives. You plan years ahead, effectively aligning internal and external defense and intelligence stakeholders to achieve long-term objectives.

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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