Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

About The Team

OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale.

About The Role

We are looking for a hands-on lead to build and run OpenAI's Incidents & Escalations function within User Operations. This is a player-coach role with a meaningful hands-on operating component. You will set the operating model and also step into active incidents and urgent escalations when needed, coordinating with on-call teams, driving clear ownership, supporting communications, and ensuring issues move through resolution and post-incident closure.

Responsibilities

• Own alert intake and triage process across support, safety, customer, and service-impacting issues.
• Assess severity, determine scope and impact, and initiate the appropriate response path.
• Page and coordinate Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, Legal, Policy, Go-To-Market, and other teams as needed.
• Lead incident response calls, manage timelines, clarify roles, and keep responders focused and unblocked.
• Create and operate the process for monitoring, processing, mitigating, and resolving critical escalations, including formal closure and handoff.
• Identify root causes behind incidents and escalations, lead retrospectives, and coordinate corrective action with accountable teams.
• Track corrective actions to closure and ensure follow-through is focused on the best possible customer outcome.
• Identify recurring operational issues, escalation patterns, and product or process gaps.
• Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Product and Support leaders to stay ahead of customer-facing incidents, reduce repeat issues, and improve readiness.
• Build a durable operating model for incidents and escalations as OpenAI scales globally.

Requirements

You will thrive in this role if you have 10+ years of experience in incident management, technical support, escalation management, SRE, technical program management, or production operations. You should have 5+ years of hands-on experience working in production, on-call, or high-urgency operational environments. Leadership experience, ideally in a Support, Engineering, or similar environment, is preferred. You must be comfortable acting as Incident Commander, owning coordination, decision-making, communication, and accountability during live incidents. Direct experience with customer-impacting incidents, executive escalations, safety-sensitive escalations, or high-severity technical issues is essential. Clear communication skills, both with engineers and non-technical audiences, are crucial. Experience with incident communications, including internal updates, executive briefings, customer updates, and status pages, is necessary. Hands-on experience with incident management, paging, and alerting tools such as incident.io, PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, or similar systems is required. Understanding monitoring and observability well enough to reason about alerts, system health, customer impact, and incident scope is important. Leading post-incident retrospectives that produce clear root causes, corrective actions, and durable improvements is expected. Driving action items to closure and holding teams accountable without creating unnecessary process drag is key. High organization, calmness, and structure in ambiguous or high-pressure situations are necessary. Balancing hands-on incident execution with longer-term systems building is ideal. Excitement to use AI and automation to improve triage, routing, summarization, reporting, knowledge management, and incident follow-through is a plus.

Qualifications

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Benefits

Compensation Range: $234K - $315K