Solutions Engineer, Digital Natives (Strategics)
Application analysis
Solutions Engineer, Digital Natives (Strategics) at OpenAI is a forward deployed ai research lab role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Solutions / Sales Engineering role centers on technical discovery, demos, POCs, and helping buyers build internal consensus. Key signals from the listing: Python, Senior scope.
About OpenAI
OpenAI ships frontier models to real customers through small, high-trust engineering teams. Forward deployed roles sit between product, research, and enterprise buyers. The role is anchored in San Francisco, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Solutions Engineer, Digital Natives (Strategics)
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Solutions Engineer, Digital Natives (Strategics) to a specific customer or deployment you owned — OpenAI hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Bring a tight demo narrative: customer pain, live workflow, and measurable before/after — treat the interview like a compressed POC.
- Show how you qualify opportunities and say no to bad-fit pilots; OpenAI values technical judgment in customer-facing roles.
- This role is tied to San Francisco — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at OpenAI
- Demonstrate customer obsession with safety constraints with a concrete example — OpenAI will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate writing and communication with a concrete example — OpenAI will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Interview loops emphasize problem decomposition, taste in product, and whether you can earn trust with technical and non-technical stakeholders quickly.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on openai.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
About the Team
The Technical Success team is responsible for the customer experience on the OpenAI suite of products, ensuring developers and enterprises maximize benefit, value, and adoption from our highly-capable models. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.
About the Role
We are seeking a solutions engineer to partner with our Digital Native customers and ensure they achieve tangible business value from our models through the OpenAI suite of products. You will partner with senior business stakeholders to understand their pre-sales needs, guide their AI strategy, and identify the highest value use cases and applications. You will work with business and technical teams to demonstrate the value of our solutions and recommend architectural patterns to kickstart their implementation and development. You will work closely with Digital Native Sales, Security, and Product teams. This role is based in San Francisco, CA or New York, NY. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will:
- Deliver an exceptional pre-sales customer experience for Digital Native prospects and customers by providing technical expertise, outlining the value proposition, and answering product, API, and LLM-related questions.
- Demonstrate how leveraging OpenAI’s suite of products can meet customers’ business needs and deliver substantial business value. This includes building and presenting demos, scoping use cases, recommending architecture patterns, and providing in-depth technical advisory.
- Create and maintain documentation, guides, and FAQs related to common questions and
requirements discovered during the pre-sales process.
- Develop and nurture strong customer relationships during the evaluation, validation, and purchasing process.
- Foster customer advocacy and represent the voice of the customer with internal teams by gathering and relaying customer feedback, identifying themes across customers, and incorporating them into product planning.
- Serve as the first line of defense for security and compliance questions, explaining standardized collateral, guiding customers toward relevant resources (e.g., trust portal), and escalating complex
requirements to the appropriate teams.
You’ll thrive in this role if you:
- Have 4+ years of experience in a technical pre-sales or similar role, selling to technology companies, managing C-level technical and business relationships with complex organizations.
- Demonstrate a thorough understanding of IT security principles and customer
requirements for technical B2B SaaS products, with experience providing higher-level security and compliance support.
- Have foundational training in programming languages like Python or Javascript.
- Have delivered prototypes of Generative AI/traditional ML solutions and have knowledge of network/cloud architecture.
- Are an effective presenter and communicator who can translate business and technical topics to all audiences, including senior leaders.
- Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
- Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.