Head of Sales Development

About the team

OpenAI’s Enterprise Go-To-Market organization helps the world’s largest companies adopt and scale our AI platform across their business—from ChatGPT Enterprise to our developer platform and APIs.

We partner with organizations across Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Retail to build new AI-powered customer experiences, transform operations, and reimagine how work gets done in highly regulated and technically complex environments. As adoption accelerates through pilots, experimentation, and developer-led use cases, the GTM team turns that momentum into durable, enterprise-wide deployments.

Sales Development sits at the front of this motion—where technical curiosity becomes executive engagement and OpenAI’s enterprise relationships begin.

About the role

We are hiring a Head of Sales Development to build and lead OpenAI’s first enterprise Sales Development organization. Reporting directly to the Chief Revenue Officer, this role is a core part of the Enterprise GTM leadership team.

This is a true 0 → 1 build. You will design the operating model, hire the initial leadership and SDR teams, and define how OpenAI engages, qualifies, and advances enterprise opportunities. Your mandate is to convert product usage, pilots, and inbound demand into high-quality, winnable pipeline for our Large Enterprise and Strategic Accounts teams.

In this role, you will

• Stand up OpenAI’s first enterprise Sales Development function, including org design, hiring plan, tooling, and performance management.

• Build and scale a global SDR organization aligned to Large Enterprise, Strategic Accounts, and industry verticals.

• Own the enterprise pipeline generation strategy, ensuring consistent, high-quality opportunity flow into the field.

• Translate product usage, pilots, developer activity, and inbound interest into qualified enterprise opportunities.

• Create vertical-specific and account-based SDR motions for Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Retail.

• Partner with Sales, Field Engineering, Marketing, Partnerships, and Strategy & Ops to orchestrate a unified GTM front door.

• Establish best-in-class outbound, inbound, ABM, product-led, and partner-sourced playbooks.

• Build a data-driven operating system that connects SDR activity to pipeline quality, deal velocity, and revenue.

• Recruit, coach, and develop second-line SDR leadership.

• Serve as a strategic partner to the CRO and Sales leadership on where and how OpenAI invests to capture enterprise demand.

• Serve as a strategic partner to the CRO and Sales leadership on where and how OpenAI invests to capture enterprise demand.

You may thrive in this role if you

• Have 10+ years in enterprise sales, revenue, or GTM leadership.

• Bring 3–5+ years of second-line SDR leadership building and managing managers.

• Have built enterprise demand engines from scratch in product-driven or platform businesses.

• Are fluent in product-led and usage-based GTM (PQLs, pilots, free-to-paid, expansion).

• Have experience selling into regulated or high-stakes industries (FS, Life Sciences, Retail).

• Are highly data-driven, with experience in pipeline analytics and forecasting.

• Thrive in matrixed GTM organizations spanning Sales, Product, Marketing, and Partnerships.

• Are a strong talent builder with the presence to engage senior enterprise and CRO-level stakeholders.

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 .

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 . 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 .

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.

Compensation

$302K – $385K + Offers Equity