Head of Industries at OpenAI in San Francisco, CA

ABOUT THE ROLE As Head of Industries, you will serve as a second-line sales leader responsible for our Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences verticals. You will set the strategy for how we win in regulated industries, lead and develop senior leaders across those businesses, and partner cross-functionally to ensure OpenAI can scale durable, compliant growth in some of the world’s most complex customer environments. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES - Lead and develop the senior leaders responsible for Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences, raising the bar on execution, talent, and culture across the portfolio. - Build a high-accountability leadership operating model with strong inspection rhythms, talent reviews, and coaching mechanisms that scale through frontline and second-line leaders. - Own the vertical GTM strategy for regulated industries, including segmentation, account prioritization, coverage design, and investment allocation. - Shape how OpenAI lands, expands, and retains customers in highly regulated markets, balancing growth objectives with risk management and long-term platform adoption. - Establish rigorous forecasting, pipeline inspection, and business review cadences that create visibility, predictability, and fast decision-making. - Drive execution on complex, multi-stakeholder deals with senior executives, procurement, legal, security, and compliance stakeholders across large enterprises. - Bring deep pattern recognition in regulated-industry sales motions, helping teams navigate governance, data sensitivity, model risk, and implementation complexity. - Partner closely with product, solutions, legal, policy, security, and finance teams to remove blockers and design scalable approaches for regulated customers. - Represent the voice of regulated-industry customers internally, influencing product priorities, messaging, packaging, and commercial strategy. - Partner with marketing and field teams to refine the Financial Services, Healthcare, and Life Sciences narratives and build repeatable demand-generation motions. - Help structure commercial frameworks, approval paths, and resource allocation decisions that align customer needs with OpenAI’s growth and risk objectives. - Ensure strong collaboration across pre-sales and post-sales teams so customers move from evaluation to production with clear ownership and long-term success plans. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR - 15–20 years of experience leading enterprise sales or go-to-market organizations, with substantial time in senior leadership roles at scale. - Demonstrated success owning and scaling large, complex regulated-industry businesses, ideally across Financial Services, Healthcare, and/or Life Sciences. - Strong expertise in regulated industries and a clear point of view on how to sell, deploy, and expand in environments with high compliance and governance requirements. - Exceptional operating rigor, including business planning, forecasting, performance management, and data-driven decision-making. - A low-ego, high-standards leader who can influence across functions and build trust with executives, peers, and teams. - Comfort leading through ambiguity and change while building structure, clarity, and durable execution in a fast-moving environment. - Experience leading through multiple layers of management and developing senior leaders is strongly preferred. SKILLS/EXPERIENCE - Non-negotiables: - Deep expertise leading teams and businesses in regulated industries, with credibility in Financial Services, Healthcare, and/or Life Sciences. - 15–20 years of experience in enterprise sales or GTM leadership, including meaningful experience managing through multiple layers of leadership. - Proven ability to build strategy and operating cadence for complex, consultative, and compliance-sensitive sales motions. - Strong talent leadership, with a track record of hiring, coaching, and elevating senior leaders and building high-performing organizations. - Strong Preferences: - Experience in AI, cloud, platform, or other highly technical product environments. - Experience influencing product, legal, risk, or commercial decisions based on customer needs in regulated markets. - Experience with consumption-based and platform sales models. - Coachables/Nice to Have: - Direct OpenAI experience is not required if the candidate can quickly build fluency in AI platforms and articulate business value credibly. - Experience working across both high-growth and large-scale enterprise environments. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf 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.