Account Director, Higher Education

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks an Account Director for Higher Education in AMER to own strategic relationships with colleges and systems guiding AI transformations. You will define value, governance, and multi-year roadmaps, coordinating with presidents, CIOs, researchers, and procurement teams to drive adoption and expansion.

You will manage the commercial journey from pipeline creation to deployment and value realization, translating AI capabilities into institutional outcomes while forecasting usage and growth

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service or SaaS solutions.
• Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems.
• Ownership of consumption- or usage-based revenue and forecasting.
• Ability to explain AI concepts to both executives and practitioners.

Responsibilities

• Own AMER higher education territory strategy and account plans.
• Lead multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities end-to-end.
• Engage presidents, CIOs, provosts, and procurement teams across functions.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design evaluations and deployments.

Skills

Enterprise sales

Higher education sales

Stakeholder engagement

Forecasting usage

AI product understanding

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Salesforce CRM

Job description

About the Role

As an Account Director for Higher Education in AMER, you will own strategic relationships with colleges, universities, and higher education systems as they move from AI experimentation to responsible, institution-wide transformation. You will work with presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic and administrative leaders, researchers, security teams, and procurement stakeholders to define priority use cases, build the technical and governance foundation for deployment, and translate institutional goals into a multi-year AI transformation roadmap.

You will own the commercial and customer journey end to end—from territory strategy, pipeline creation, and executive alignment through evaluation, procurement, deployment, adoption, consumption, value realization, and expansion. This is a deeply technical, consultative sales role. You will be expected to understand AI capabilities and limitations, integration patterns, data governance, privacy, security, and change management; partner effectively with technical experts; and remain accountable for measurable customer and revenue outcomes after signature.

In this role, you will:

• Own and execute the AMER higher education territory and account strategy, prioritizing institutions where OpenAI can support meaningful, responsible, and scalable transformation.
• Create pipeline and lead complex, multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities from first engagement through procurement, deployment, adoption, and value realization.
• Engage credibly with presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic leaders, researchers, administrators, security teams, legal, procurement, finance, and end-user champions.
• Lead cross-functional pursuit and account teams across Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, Research, Security, Legal, and other functions to design evaluations, pilots, technical validation, executive business cases, production deployments, and adoption plans.
• Translate AI model and platform capabilities, limitations, integration approaches, governance requirements, privacy, security, and safety considerations into clear institutional value, credible technical plans, and practical transformation roadmaps.
• Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast pipeline and usage-based growth; and use adoption, value realization, and expansion signals to manage the business.
• Develop durable executive relationships and a broad coalition of institutional champions across decentralized stakeholder groups.
• Bring structured market insight from higher education customers into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy.
• Represent OpenAI as a thoughtful partner at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions, and the broader higher education ecosystem.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions, with a sustained record of meeting or exceeding meaningful revenue targets through complex, multi-year enterprise sales motions.
• Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems, with a strong understanding of decentralized decision-making, academic and administrative stakeholders, governance, procurement, privacy, security, and change management.
• Demonstrated ownership of consumption- or usage-based revenue, including forecasting usage, driving adoption, creating new use cases, and converting customer outcomes into expansion.
• The technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead effective discovery, partner closely with technical teams, explain technical concepts accurately at both executive and practitioner altitudes, and translate them into academic, operational, research, and commercial outcomes.
• Experience leading strategic transformations rather than isolated point-solution sales, including governance, change management, adoption, and measurable operational, academic, research, or user outcomes.
• Strong executive presence, structured communication, and the ability to earn trust across senior leaders, technical experts, faculty, administrators, and end users.
• Excellent account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills.
• High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort operating through ambiguity, product change, and evolving customer needs.
• A mission-driven approach to deploying AI responsibly and helping institutions build durable capability rather than short-lived pilots.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are customer-centric and start with the institution’s mission, users, constraints, and desired outcomes rather than a predetermined product pitch.
• Can move fluidly between a boardroom conversation about institutional strategy and a working session about architecture, data, governance, rollout, and measurement.
• Treat the signature as the beginning of the work and are energized by adoption, usage growth, value realization, and expansion.
• Are a builder who creates repeatable plays while adapting to the distinctive culture and operating model of each institution.
• Bring informed optimism about AI alongside the rigor to surface risks, tradeoffs, and implementation realities.

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.

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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