Strategic Delivery Lead, Department of Energy & Science

The OpenAI for Government team brings frontier AI to public institutions. The 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).

As Strategic Delivery Lead, you 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. You own delivery coordination, adoption, and customer outcomes, without an individual sales quota.

• Build trusted relationships with DOE leadership, lab directors, research leaders, and technical and mission teams.
• Own delivery plans for assigned DOE and national lab engagements, with clear milestones, accountable owners, customer acceptance criteria, and measurable outcomes.
• Translate research and mission needs into requirements and decisions for engineers, researchers, and senior leaders.
• Connect national lab researchers with OpenAI Research, Product, and Engineering teams to assess and scope scientific applications.
• Coordinate the Applied AI Architect, specialist engineers, and customer technical teams on architecture, data access, evaluation, integration, and deployment.
• Build sustained adoption through practical enablement, user feedback, workflow support, and repeatable playbooks.
• Lead executive reviews and focused workshops in Washington and at customer sites.
• Identify security, data, infrastructure, contractual, and resourcing risks early and work with accountable teams to resolve them.
• Prioritize across a small, matrixed team and maintain momentum as customer needs evolve.
• Coordinate with the Account Director, policy colleagues, and partners on broader DOE and science engagement.

• 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.
• Willing to travel domestically when an in-person engagement materially advances customer priorities.
• Understand DOE headquarters, the national lab ecosystem, and how government sponsors, lab management, researchers, and technical teams make decisions.
• Have led complex AI/ML, enterprise software, API, cloud, scientific computing, or digital transformation engagements through implementation and sustained adoption.
• Executive presence and a record of influencing senior government and laboratory leaders.
• 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.
• 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.
• Curious about frontier AI and actively experiment with the technology.
• Build durable partnerships across scientists, engineers, security teams, program owners, and executives.
• See yourself as a bridge between frontier AI research and practical scientific impact.
• Help customers use AI responsibly, with appropriate data protection, human review, provenance, reproducibility, and scientific validation.

Salary range: $266K – $370K per year, plus equity.

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