Strategic Delivery Lead, Department of Energy & Science

About the team

The OpenAI for Government team brings frontier AI to public institutions to help them achieve their missions. We partner with government leaders, scientists, and technical teams to deploy AI tools responsibly, with the reliability, security, and support needed for meaningful use.

Our Energy & Science pod supports the Department of Energy (DOE), U.S. national laboratories, and the broader federal science community, including NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF). We help these institutions apply frontier AI to scientific research, engineering, and mission operations through hands-on delivery, tailored enablement, and collaboration between researchers.

About the Role

The Strategic Delivery Lead, Department of Energy & Science, will shape and deliver high-impact AI engagements across DOE headquarters and the U.S. national laboratory ecosystem. You will turn customer priorities into practical deployments and sustained use, helping scientists and mission teams apply OpenAI technology to research, scientific computing, knowledge discovery, and operational workflows.

This individual contributor role reports to the leader of Federal Civilian and State & Local Government. You will work alongside the pod’s Account Director and Applied AI Architect, coordinating Research, Product, Engineering, Policy, Security, and Enablement resources. The Account Director owns commercial strategy, contracts, and quota; you own delivery coordination, adoption, and customer outcomes, without an individual sales quota.

You will lead execution across customer and OpenAI workstreams: define scope, milestones, acceptance criteria, dependencies, and success measures; surface risks; resolve blockers; and communicate progress to researchers, lab directors, and DOE leadership. You are accountable for agreed delivery commitments and customer acceptance. Engineering and Product teams remain responsible for technical implementation and operation of the systems they own.

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role combining senior relationship leadership with hands-on execution. Success requires sound judgment, technical fluency, strong program management, and the ability to turn executive alignment into useful technology in scientists’ hands.

This role is based in Washington, DC, with domestic travel for high-value customer engagements, workshops, and delivery milestones.

In this role, you will:

• Build trusted relationships with DOE leadership, lab directors, research leaders, and technical and mission teams to identify priorities and turn senior alignment into actionable engagements.

• Own delivery plans for assigned DOE and national lab engagements, with clear milestones, accountable owners, customer acceptance criteria, and measurable scientific or operational outcomes.

• Translate research and mission needs into requirements and decisions that engineers, researchers, and senior leaders can act on; communicate progress, limitations, risks, and dependencies clearly.

• Connect national lab researchers with OpenAI Research, Product, and Engineering teams to assess promising scientific applications and move feasible opportunities into scoped, supported projects.

• Coordinate the Applied AI Architect, specialist engineers, and customer technical teams on architecture, data access, evaluation, integration, and deployment requirements.

• Build sustained adoption through practical enablement, user feedback, workflow support, and repeatable playbooks that can be applied across labs and other science agencies.

• Lead executive reviews and focused workshops in Washington and at customer sites, bringing the right decision-makers and technical experts together to resolve issues and advance delivery.

• Identify security, data, infrastructure, contractual, and resourcing risks early; work with the accountable teams to resolve them and escalate decisions promptly.

• Prioritize across a small, matrixed team, make clear trade-offs, and maintain momentum as customer needs and model capabilities evolve.

• Coordinate with the Account Director, policy colleagues, and partners on broader DOE and science engagement, while keeping delivery commitments aligned with available resources and approved capabilities.

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ years of experience leading complex technical programs, customer delivery, or transformation initiatives, including substantial work with DOE, U.S. national labs, or comparable federal science institutions.

• Can meet customer-specific access requirements. An active DOE Q and/or U.S. Government TS/SCI clearance is preferred for engagements involving national security missions.

• Are willing to travel domestically when an in-person engagement materially advances customer priorities, relationships, or delivery; use Washington-based engagement and remote collaboration effectively.

• Understand DOE headquarters, the national lab ecosystem, and how government sponsors, lab management, researchers, and technical teams make decisions and deliver work.

• Have led complex AI/ML, enterprise software, API, cloud, scientific computing, or digital transformation engagements through implementation and sustained adoption.

• Bring executive presence and a record of influencing senior government and laboratory leaders, while remaining personally accountable for follow-through with working teams.

• Translate scientific and mission goals into practical execution plans, acceptance criteria, and measures such as workflow adoption, researcher productivity, output quality, and time to a validated result.

• Have enough technical fluency to evaluate AI use cases, challenge assumptions, and work credibly with architects and researchers on data integration, model evaluation, and deployment trade-offs.

• Are curious about frontier AI and actively experiment with the technology to understand its capabilities, limitations, and applications to scientific work.

• Build durable partnerships across scientists, engineers, security teams, program owners, and executives; thrive in ambiguity and take initiative in a fast-moving environment.

• See yourself as a bridge between frontier AI research and practical scientific impact, with the judgment to distinguish a promising demonstration from a validated result.

• Help customers use AI responsibly, with appropriate data protection, human review, provenance, reproducibility, and scientific validation.

• Existing relationships across DOE and the national labs, experience with NNSA, and familiarity with NASA or NSF are valuable.

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.

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