Data Engineer Lead, Business

About the Team

OpenAI’s Go-To-Market (GTM) organization is scaling rapidly to bring our technology to more users and organizations worldwide. Our Business Data team is building the foundation for intelligent, scalable, and trustworthy data systems that power our Sales, Marketing, and User Operations teams.

We’re now forming a dedicated GTM Data Engineering pod and hiring a foundational team lead to shape the future of our business data infrastructure.

About the Role

We are looking for a Data Engineer Lead to architect, build, and maintain the core data infrastructure powering OpenAI’s business operations. This person will set the technical direction and lead a high-impact team working across product usage, sales, marketing, experimentation, and automation datasets. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise in modern data systems with the ability to partner closely with business stakeholders and shape team culture.

In this role, you will:

• Set the technical direction and build the GTM Data Engineering function from the ground up

• Own and maintain Tier-1 data pipelines that support sales, customer support, marketing attribution, experimentation, and more

• Implement observability, monitoring, and SLA enforcement for critical datasets

• Collaborate with leaders across Sales, Marketing, Growth, User Ops, and Data to prioritize and deliver on high-impact projects

• Define and uphold engineering best practices for data modeling, lineage, and warehouse architecture

• Shape the team’s structure, mentor engineers, and help grow a world-class function

• Build systems that enable automation and AI-native insights generation and decision-making

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 5+ years managing high performing data engineering teams, as well as 10+ years of data engineering and/or software engineering experience

• Have significant experience building and maintaining robust ETL pipelines

• Are highly proficient in SQL and Python, with strong data modeling and schema design expertise

• Have worked with distributed data technologies like Apache Spark, Kafka, and cloud storage (e.g., S3)

• Have experience hiring and mentoring top technical talent and building exceptional teams

• Can drive long-term technical vision while remaining deeply engaged in hands-on execution

• Have a strong business and product sense, and enjoy working closely with business stakeholders to solve complex problems

• Have experience (or a keen interest) in domains like sales lifecycle, support workflows, marketing attribution, and experimentation

• Are motivated by the opportunity to build new systems in a high-growth environment, with a focus on quality, scale, and automation

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.