Strategic Delivery Lead, Critical InfrastructureStrategic Delivery Lead, Critical Infrastructure

About the team

The OpenAI for Government team is a mission-driven group bringing frontier AI to public-sector and national security missions. We partner with government agencies and their industry counterparts to apply OpenAI’s API and enterprise products to high-priority challenges, with careful attention to security, privacy, reliability, and responsible use.

In this role, you will help government agencies, infrastructure owners and operators, and technology partners apply frontier AI to strengthen critical infrastructure security and resilience. You will connect technical teams and mission leaders to develop practical applications for cyber defense and operational preparedness across sectors such as energy, water, healthcare, financial services, and the defense industrial base. We accelerate adoption through hands-on support, tailored enablement, and measurable outcomes while preserving human judgment and protecting sensitive information.

About the Role

The Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL) for Critical Infrastructure will identify, shape, and deliver OpenAI’s highest-impact engagements supporting the security and resilience of U.S. critical infrastructure. You will help government and industry partners translate priorities—including cyber defense, vulnerability management, incident preparedness and response, infrastructure risk analysis, and operational coordination—into secure, technically feasible AI deployments.

This role sits at the intersection of technical delivery, public-private collaboration, and national cyber strategy. You will work with federal agencies, infrastructure operators, and technology providers to define shared goals and turn promising pilots into sustainable operational capabilities. Internally, you will partner with Research, Engineering, Go-to-Market, Security, Legal, Privacy, and other teams to align scope, resolve delivery obstacles, and communicate progress from working teams to senior leadership.

You will own end-to-end execution of delivery workstreams with Forward Deployed Engineers, Researchers, Solutions Architects, and Enablement teams. You will establish outcomes, requirements, roadmaps, milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria; coordinate integration, evaluation, security review, and rollout; and remain accountable for contractual milestones, delivery governance, and measurable customer value.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires technical fluency, strong program leadership, executive presence, and sound judgment about deploying AI in environments where service continuity and public trust matter.

In this role, you will:

• Build trusted relationships with government mission owners, cyber leaders, sector risk management agencies, infrastructure owners and operators, and technology partners to identify and prioritize high-value AI applications.

• Own complex engagements from discovery and solution shaping through pilot, security review, deployment, customer acceptance, and sustained adoption. Establish delivery roadmaps, integrated schedules, risk tracking, decision processes, and customer reporting.

• Translate critical infrastructure missions, cyber risks, policy requirements, data constraints, and operating conditions into clear technical requirements, delivery plans, and executive communications.

• Develop public-private delivery efforts with federal cyber agencies, sector partners, cloud providers, and cybersecurity companies. Align organizations with different incentives, resources, and definitions of success around shared operational outcomes.

• Lead delivery of AI capabilities supporting defensive workflows such as vulnerability discovery and prioritization, secure software development, threat analysis, incident response, and infrastructure risk assessment, partnering with technical and operational experts on design, evaluation, and execution.

• Coordinate deployment requirements across government and enterprise environments, including sensitive or restricted networks where appropriate. Address data handling, identity and access controls, integration dependencies, and customer security requirements.

• Work with security, privacy, legal, and operational stakeholders to establish evaluations, human oversight, adversarial testing, and ongoing monitoring appropriate to each use case, including potential effects on operational technology and essential services.

• Define and track measures of customer value, including user adoption, model quality, operational readiness, time saved, and improvements in defensive effectiveness.

• Bring insight from customers and partners back to Research, Product, and Engineering to inform capability development and deployment priorities. Anticipate technical, operational, contractual, and partnership risks and resolve delivery tradeoffs.

• Support opportunity qualification, proposal development, and statements of work with Account Directors and partners. Define a practical path from pilot to sustained adoption, including operational ownership, resources, funding, and measures of success.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience leading critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, national security, or complex technical programs, including substantial experience working with U.S. government agencies and industry partners.

• Hold an active U.S. Government TS/SCI clearance and can meet customer-specific access requirements.

• Are willing to travel up to 50% and work on-site with customers and partners to understand their missions, users, and operating environments.

• Understand the U.S. critical infrastructure ecosystem, including federal cyber agencies, sector risk management agencies, infrastructure owners and operators, and the public-private partnerships that support national resilience.

• Have led complex programs or public-private initiatives from strategy and planning through execution and sustained operations. Can translate policy objectives into technical work streams, clear ownership, and measurable results.

• Bring executive presence and experience advising senior government, industry, and technical leaders. Can explain complex cyber and AI issues, address objections, and build agreement across organizations.

• Have the technical fluency to work credibly with researchers, engineers, and cyber practitioners. Understand modern AI solution architectures—including large language models, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, and data integration—and can work with technical teams to assess feasibility, evaluation needs, and delivery risks.

• Can turn customer outcomes into requirements, statements of work, integrated schedules, acceptance criteria, and evaluation plans. Understand what makes a pilot operationally and financially sustainable.

• Understand the security and reliability constraints of critical infrastructure, including the relationship between information technology, operational technology, and continuity of essential services.

• Build durable partnerships across government, industry, research, and technical teams. Create clarity in ambiguous situations, adapt when evidence changes, and build trust through accountability, curiosity, and open communication.

• Care deeply about strengthening national resilience and helping critical infrastructure partners use frontier AI safely, responsibly, and effectively.

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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Compensation: $266K - $295K