Field CTO
OpenAI · San Francisco, United States · 17d ago
About the Role
As a Field CTO (Strategic Pursuits), you will serve as a strategic bridge between our customers, go-to-market (GTM) teams, and product organization. You will partner closely with Sales, Technical Success, and Product to shape high-impact deals, guide customer architecture decisions, and influence our product roadmap based on real-world adoption and feedback.
This is a highly cross-functional, externally facing leadership role for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong business acumen and customer empathy.
In this role, you will:
Customer & Deal Strategy
Partner with Sales, Product and Technical Success teams to support complex, high-value deals as a technical and strategic advisor.
Translate customer business needs into scalable technical solutions and architectures.
Engage with senior customer stakeholders (CTO/CIO/VP-level) to drive alignment on vision, roadmap, and adoption.
Lead technical strategy discussions during key deal stages, including discovery, solution design, and executive presentations.
Architecture & Implementation Guidance
Guide customers on best practices for deploying and scaling AI-driven solutions in production.
Provide architectural oversight across use cases such as LLM applications, integrations, data pipelines, and security.
Act as a trusted advisor to ensure long-term success, not just short-term wins.
Product & Feedback Loop
Bring structured customer insights back to Product and Engineering teams to inform roadmap and prioritization.
Identify gaps, opportunities, and emerging patterns from customer deployments.
Influence product direction based on real-world usage, scalability needs, and enterprise requirements.
GTM Strategy & Thought Leadership
Help shape GTM strategies by identifying repeatable patterns across industries and customer segments.
Develop scalable frameworks, reference architectures, and playbooks for broader field teams.
Represent the company externally through customer engagements, industry events, and thought leadership.
Experience
15+ years of experience in technical leadership roles.
Strong background in enterprise architecture, cloud platforms, and modern software systems.
Experience supporting enterprise sales cycles or working closely with GTM teams.
Exposure to AI/ML systems, especially LLMs and applied AI use cases, is highly preferred.
Skills & Capabilities
Ability to translate complex technical concepts into clear business value for non-technical stakeholders.
Strong problem-solving skills with a bias for action and ownership.
Excellent communication and executive presence.
Proven ability to influence without authority across cross-functional teams.
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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