Private Equity Lead

About the Role

As Private Equity Lead, you will serve as a senior front-line commercial leader responsible for building and scaling OpenAI’s private equity segment.

You will own the strategy for how we win with private equity firms and their portfolio companies, serve as a senior external relationship leader with sponsors, operating partners, and portfolio executives, and partner cross-functionally to drive durable revenue growth through disciplined origination, account development, and execution.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the private equity GTM strategy, including sponsor prioritization, account selection, coverage design, and investment allocation.

• Serve as the senior relationship lead for private equity firms, operating partners, deal teams, and key portfolio executives, building trust at the highest levels.

• Drive origination, pipeline creation, and revenue growth across both direct sponsor relationships and portfolio company opportunities.

• Shape how OpenAI lands, expands, and retains business in sponsor-backed environments, balancing near-term commercial wins with long-term platform adoption.

• Build a high-accountability front-line operating model with strong inspection rhythms, forecasting rigor, and clear performance expectations.

• Translate sponsor priorities and portfolio value-creation goals into commercial opportunities and scalable AI solutions.

• Drive execution on complex, multi-stakeholder deals with senior business leaders, technical stakeholders, procurement, legal, security, and operating partners.

• Build credibility with PE firms as a strategic commercial partner who understands both investment priorities and operating realities across portfolio companies.

• Develop account plans and expansion strategies that connect sponsor relationships to repeatable portfolio-level growth.

• Partner closely with industry leaders, product, solutions, legal, policy, security, and finance teams to remove blockers and accelerate high-value opportunities.

• Represent the voice of private equity customers internally, influencing product priorities, messaging, packaging, and commercial strategy.

• Partner with marketing and field teams to refine the private equity narrative and build repeatable demand-generation and expansion motions.

• Help structure commercial frameworks, approval paths, and resource allocation decisions that align customer needs with OpenAI’s growth objectives.

• Ensure strong collaboration across pre-sales and post-sales teams so customers move from evaluation to production with clear ownership and long-term success plans.

What We’re Looking For

• 15–20 years of experience leading enterprise sales or go-to-market organizations, with substantial time in senior front-line leadership roles.

• Demonstrated success owning and scaling large, complex strategic-account or segment businesses with clear revenue accountability.

• Strong credibility with senior external stakeholders and a clear point of view on how to build durable sponsor and portfolio relationships.

• Strong expertise in private equity or adjacent relationship-driven enterprise ecosystems, with an understanding of how to create leverage across firms and portfolio companies.

• Exceptional operating rigor, including business planning, forecasting, performance management, and data-driven decision-making.

• A low-ego, high-standards leader who can influence across functions and build trust with executives, peers, and teams.

• Comfort leading through ambiguity and change while building structure, clarity, and durable execution in a fast-moving environment.

• Experience building new motions, segments, or strategic-account businesses is strongly preferred.

Skills/experience

• Non-negotiables:

  • Deep experience leading complex enterprise or strategic commercial motions with clear revenue ownership.

  • Strong credibility in private equity, financial sponsors, or adjacent relationship-driven ecosystems.

  • 15–20 years of experience in enterprise sales or GTM leadership, including meaningful front-line leadership experience.

  • Proven ability to build strategy and operating cadence for consultative, multi-stakeholder, high-value sales motions.

  • Strong talent leadership, with a track record of hiring, coaching, and elevating senior commercial talent.

• Strong Preferences:

  • Experience in AI, cloud, platform, or other highly technical product environments.

  • Experience navigating both sponsor-level and portfolio-company-level relationships.

  • Experience influencing product, legal, or commercial decisions based on customer needs and market feedback.

  • Experience with consumption-based and platform sales models.

• Coachables/Nice to Have:

  • Direct OpenAI experience is not required if the candidate can quickly build fluency in AI platforms and articulate business value credibly.

  • Experience working across both high-growth and large-scale enterprise environments.

  • Experience building a segment from early structure to repeatable scale.

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.

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