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Early-Stage Ecosystem (IC) at OpenAI in San Francisco, CA
Job Description
About the Team:
OpenAI’s Early-Stage Ecosystem team identifies and wins the next generation of startups that will matter most.
About the Role:
As an IC Ecosystem Lead, you will own a small, high-leverage portfolio of relationships quarterly (~5–15) with exceptional founders and technical teams - often before the market fully recognizes them. Your work will shape OpenAI’s reputation in the ecosystem, accelerate breakthrough partner outcomes, and create a durable pipeline of applied and research collaborations that benefit startups and help inform our product and model roadmap.
This is a high-taste, high-agency role at the intersection of founder trust, technical depth, and cross-functional execution. You’ll operate closely with research, product, and go-to-market teams, as well as internal evaluation and model-improvement partners - turning startup needs into concrete technical engagements, evaluation work, and strategic opportunities.
What You’ll Do:
Own a portfolio of high-taste startup relationships
Manage ~5–15 key startup partnerships at any time (mix of new bets + series-a folks).
Build deep founder trust through fast, thoughtful support and clear value creation.
Identify the “correct” emerging companies each quarter - especially those likely to become major partners within ~24 months.
Convert portfolio startups into high-touch strategic engagements by surfacing high-value evaluation opportunities and managing them end-to-end.
Shape OpenAI’s early-stage perception and founder preference
Identify the “correct” emerging companies each quarter - especially those likely to become major partners within ~24 months.
Create and host high-quality founder gatherings with strong attendance bars.
Work with Comms and Developer Experience to produce technical content (blogs, short-form, talks) that resonates with the next generation of founders.
Build niche technical micro-communities around key developer/founder interests.
Drive evals and research-adjacent engagements
Partner with solutions and evaluation teams to translate real-world product usage into actionable improvements.
Execute creative strategic/commercial work
Support strategic recruiting and other high-conviction cross-functional opportunities as needed.
Collaborate with co-sell / co-market motions when it accelerates top partners.
Act as a sharp internal signal: what’s real in the ecosystem, what’s buzz.
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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