Account Director, Federal Civilian (Washington)

About the team
OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals into one lab together to accomplish this.

In pursuit of this mission, our Go To Market (GTM) team is responsible for helping customers learn how to leverage and deploy our highly capable AI products across their organization. The team comprises Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, and Partnership professionals who collaborate to create valuable solutions that will help bring AI to as many users as possible.

About the role

Our Federal Sales team has a unique mission to help government customers understand the transformative impact that highly capable AI models can bring to their agencies and missions. This role combines technical understanding, strategic vision, partnership management, and value-driven strategy tailored specifically to federal customers.

You’ll drive key opportunities through the entire federal sales cycle, from pipeline generation to closure. You’ll collaborate closely with researchers, engineers, and solution strategists to help government customers advance their missions through AI.

This role is a remote role based in Washington, DC.

In this role, you'll:

• Manage a focused set of key federal accounts, developing and executing comprehensive federal account plans.

• Lead federal customers through their AI adoption journey, from consideration to successful deployment.

• Partner with solutions and research engineering to build and execute complex government customer programs and projects.

• Own and manage a federal consumption revenue target.

• Oversee consumption revenue forecasting and reporting.

• Analyze key federal account metrics and provide insights to internal and external stakeholders.

• Closely monitor the federal landscape (agencies, policies, competitors, partners, etc.) to inform product roadmaps and corporate strategies.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with solutions, marketing, communications, business operations, people operations, finance, product management, and engineering.

• Support the recruitment and onboarding of federal-focused team members.

• Foster the development of our company culture within the federal practice.

We're seeking someone with experience including:

• 14+ years selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service specifically into federal government accounts.

• Achieving federal revenue targets of >$2M per year consistently over multiple years.

• Designing and executing complex federal deal strategies, including familiarity with government contracting and procurement processes.

• Supporting growth in fast-paced, high-performance federal environments.

• Working directly with senior government executives and federal agency leaders.

• Communicating technical and strategic concepts clearly to government customers and internal stakeholders.

• Leading high-visibility federal customer events, briefings, and industry engagements.

• Gathering, distilling, and processing detailed federal market intelligence (agency priorities, policy changes, competitor activities, etc.).

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand go to market best practices and raise the bar for our organization. You think and plan forward on the order of years and bring internal and external stakeholders along with your strategy.

• Are customer-centric. You are motivated to deeply understand federal customers’ priorities and help them achieve their mission-critical objectives using AI. You build trusted relationships with government executives and stakeholders across agencies.

• Have a passion or deep curiosity about artificial intelligence. You embrace the opportunity to help deploy OpenAI’s technology in a way that benefits federal missions and humanity. You’re enthusiastic about educating government customers on AI capabilities and strategic implications.

• Are a builder. You enjoy impacting how our company grows its federal business. You excel in establishing robust systems and processes tailored to federal requirements, executing them with precision and agility.

• Are excited by new challenges. You thrive when solving complex federal-specific problems. Bespoke challenges requiring multidimensional federal knowledge excite you, and you’re eager to experiment with innovative solutions within government environments.

• Are a strategist. You deeply understand federal go-to-market best practices and proactively contribute to strategic initiatives. You plan years ahead, effectively aligning internal and external federal stakeholders to achieve long-term objectives.

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 .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

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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.