Support Engineering Team Lead

About the Role

We are looking for a leader to build and scale our Support Engineering team, which will collaborate directly with our strategic enterprise accounts, our product and engineering teams, as well as our field teams to solve some of the most difficult technical problems faced by our customers. You will lead one of the best technical troubleshooting teams at OpenAI, and our customers and Engineering teams will look to you for technical guidance in addressing the most technically difficult issues in our environment. You will play an integral role in building knowledge within the team and be part of strategic initiatives for organizational and process improvements. Working directly with our most strategic customers - You will be crucial to the success of the most innovative, disruptive, and high-scale AI solutions being built with the OpenAI platform.

This team will handle high difficulty situations and issues. The team will be global, providing 24x7 technical coverage for our customers. This will be an opportunity to build this new team from first principles - your leadership will determine the future of this organization.

The ideal candidate will have a combination of technical capabilities mixed with strong leadership and systems building strength.

This role is based Remotely in Toronto, Canada.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and lead a team of the foremost technical and troubleshooting experts at OpenAI. You are the last line of defense before the core Engineering team.

• Partner with engineering and customer teams to build out our systems to ensure that we resolve escalated issues. You will engage with senior leaders internally or with customers and coordinate resources across multiple teams as needed.

• Take learnings from resolving customer issues and operationalize those solutions at scale, iterating on internal processes with Engineering/Go-To-Market/vendor partners, influencing product roadmaps, and improving overall customer experience with support.

• Manage scaling and operations of the team in order to deliver 24x7 coverage globally, including holidays and weekends based on business needs.

• Build strong relationships with our customers to ensure their application’s success.

• Ensure the team is assisting broadly where needed beyond the ‘core remit’ of the team

• Be a part of the broader leadership team in Support. You will have the opportunity to build not just within this team, but across the organization.

Qualifications:

• Have 6+ years of experience leading and managing technical support engineering or software engineering teams, ideally in high-scale or fast-paced environments.

• Have 10+ years of experience in technical support engineering or software engineering

• Have experience leading highly skilled engineering teams and are comfortable empowering senior ICs while setting a clear technical and operational direction.

• Bring deep technical experience in application development or infrastructure, paired with a strong instinct for operational systems and customer reliability.

• Are a strong cross-functional partner with a proven ability to influence engineering and product roadmaps through support-driven insights.

• Take an automation-first approach and have a track record of implementing tooling or processes that scale support impact through AI and systems thinking.

• Thrive in ambiguous environments and balance strategic leadership with a willingness to get into technical details when needed.

• Are energized by customer impact and excel at building trust with strategic accounts during critical issues or periods of transformation.

• Are mission-driven, collaborative, and operate with high integrity and humility.