Dedicated Support Engineer - San Francisco

OpenAI's User Operations team shepherds customers' adoption of AI and ensures their product experience is exceptional. The Support Engineering team works closely with Engineering, Product, Technical Success, and Go-to-Market teams to deliver an exceptional experience for OpenAI's most strategic customers. The role combines deep technical troubleshooting with durable customer context, proactive reliability work, and clear ownership during critical moments, serving as a trusted support partner for Premium Support customers.

Responsibilities

Work directly with Premium Support customers to troubleshoot their most complex technical issues, including API failures, integration challenges, authentication errors, unexpected product behavior, performance degradation, and production incidents; Provide end-to-end technical ownership by analyzing logs and system behavior, reproducing errors, testing hypotheses, and isolating the likely failure domain; Become a trusted expert on OpenAI's products and systems, serving as a critical escalation point and technical backstop for strategic customers; Own the customer-specific response to high-impact incidents, including severity and business impact assessment, coordinating cross-functional responders, and ensuring post-incident follow-through; Communicate clearly and proactively with customer technical teams, business stakeholders, executives, and internal partners; Develop and document a detailed understanding of each customer's architecture, integrations, dependencies, critical workloads, and operational constraints; Partner with Go-to-Market and Technical Success teams to inform severity, prioritization, and communication; Represent Support Engineering in customer meetings, including QBRs; Monitor customer integrations and support trends to identify emerging risks and recurring failure patterns; Prepare for launches, migrations, traffic increases, and business events with account-specific runbooks and heightened monitoring; Lead or contribute to incident reviews and postmortems and track corrective actions; Translate recurring customer pain into evidence-backed feedback for Product and Engineering; Turn customer investigations into scalable improvements such as troubleshooting guides, monitoring, internal tooling, and AI-powered automation; Help shape the operating model, technical standards, and tooling for Premium Support as the function grows globally

Requirements

Significant experience in Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or another role involving hands-on diagnosis of complex production issues; Expert-level troubleshooting skills and a strong track record of resolving ambiguous technical problems across APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations; Comfortable working with logs, metrics, traces, API requests, authentication flows, and customer-provided code or configurations to understand system behavior and test hypotheses; Experience leading or playing a central role in customer-impacting incidents, including severity assessment, technical coordination, stakeholder communication, root-cause analysis, and post-incident follow-through; Can communicate complex technical issues clearly to engineers, customer technical teams, business stakeholders, and senior leaders, especially when information is incomplete or evolving; Build strong, high-trust relationships with customers and cross-functional partners while maintaining clear and scalable ownership boundaries; Look beyond the immediate issue to identify patterns, improve the system, and prevent recurrence; Thrive in ambiguity, update quickly as new information emerges, and are willing to learn whatever is needed; Bring a humble, team-first mindset, strong judgment, and a genuine eagerness to help both customers and colleagues succeed; Excited to use OpenAI's products, agents, and emerging AI capabilities to transform technical support at scale

Nice to have

Experience with Python, JavaScript, or similar languages is valuable; Ability to write code or scripts to reproduce issues, interrogate systems, automate repetitive work, and improve internal tools