Strategic Delivery Lead, Federal Civilian & State and Local Government

About the teamThe OpenAI for Government team brings frontier AI to public institutions to help them achieve their missions. We partner with government leaders, mission owners, and technical teams to deploy AI tools responsibly, with the reliability, security, and support needed for meaningful use.

Our Federal Civilian and State & Local Government business supports public institutions across a broad range of missions. We help these customers apply frontier AI to public services, knowledge work, research, and mission operations through hands-on delivery, tailored enablement, and collaboration with their teams.

About the RoleThe Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL), Federal Civilian & State and Local Government, will shape and deliver high-impact AI engagements across federal civilian agencies and state and local governments. You will turn customer priorities into practical deployments and sustained use, helping government leaders and mission teams apply OpenAI technology to public services, knowledge discovery, and operational workflows.

This individual contributor role reports to the leader of Federal Civilian and State & Local Government. You will work alongside Account Directors and Applied AI Architects across assigned engagements, coordinating Research, Product, Engineering, Policy, Security, and Enablement resources. Account Directors own commercial strategy, contracts, and quota; you own delivery coordination, adoption, and customer outcomes, without an individual sales quota.

You will lead execution across customer and OpenAI workstreams: define scope, milestones, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and success measures; surface risks; resolve blockers; and communicate progress to agency executives, program leaders, and working teams. You are accountable for agreed delivery commitments and customer acceptance. Engineering and Product teams remain responsible for technical implementation and operation of the systems they own.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role combining senior relationship leadership with hands-on execution. Success requires sound judgment, technical fluency, strong program management, and the ability to turn executive alignment into useful technology in government teams’ hands.

This role is based in Washington, DC, with domestic travel for high-value customer engagements, workshops, and delivery milestones.

In this role, you will:- Build trusted relationships with senior government leaders, program owners, and technical and mission teams to identify priorities and turn senior alignment into actionable engagements.

• Own delivery plans for assigned federal civilian and state and local government engagements, with clear milestones, accountable owners, customer acceptance criteria, and measurable mission or operational outcomes.

• Translate customer and mission needs into requirements and decisions that engineers, domain experts, and senior leaders can act on; communicate progress, limitations, risks, and dependencies clearly.

• Connect customer mission and technical teams with OpenAI Research, Product, and Engineering teams to assess promising applications and move feasible opportunities into scoped, supported projects.

• Coordinate the Applied AI Architect, specialist engineers, and customer technical teams on architecture, data access, evaluation, integration, and deployment requirements.

• Build sustained adoption through practical enablement, user feedback, workflow support, and repeatable playbooks that can be applied across agencies and government customers.

• Lead executive reviews and focused workshops in Washington and at customer sites, bringing the right decision-makers and technical experts together to resolve issues and advance delivery.

• Identify security, data, infrastructure, contractual, and resourcing risks early; work with the accountable teams to resolve them and escalate decisions promptly.

• Prioritize across a small, matrixed team, make clear trade-offs, and...