Support Vendor Manager

ABOUT THE TEAM

The Support team is central to ensuring that our customers' experience with our products is nothing short of exceptional. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.

Given OpenAI’s breakneck shipping cadence and growth – and the expectation that it will only accelerate – our ability to architect automation systems and agentic workflows for scale is central to our ability to maintain exceptional support quality in the face of AGI.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As a Support Vendor Manager, you will own the health, performance, and long-term scalability of multiple support partner and vendor relationships. This is a vendor leadership role first and foremost: you will drive commercial and operational accountability (SLAs, QBRs, escalation paths, remediation plans), while also building the operating model that enables support to scale without linear headcount growth.

A core component of this role (approximately 25–30%) is establishing how we do Workforce Management (WFM) across both internal teams and external BPO partners. This is not an intraday scheduling or WFM analyst role. Instead, you will define the frameworks, standards, and systems for forecasting, capacity planning, staffing strategy, and performance-to-plan—then partner with Operations, Data, Systems/Tooling, and vendor leaders to implement and run them.

You’ll collaborate closely with User Operations teams (e.g., Trust & Safety, Fraud & Risk), Systems/Tooling, Data partners, and Product/PM stakeholders as we launch new workflow and launch and scale new programs.

YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR:

• End-to-end vendor leadership: Own day-to-day oversight, relationship health, and executive-level accountability for multiple support vendors/BPOs.

• Performance management & remediation: Define and manage SLA/KPI performance expectations, run WBRs/QBRs, identify performance gaps, and drive structured turnaround plans with clear owners and timelines.

• Escalation and risk management: Serve as the primary escalation point for vendor issues, including incident response, surge events, quality regressions, and continuity risks; ensure vendors have strong operational controls and playbooks.

• Commercial and operational governance: Partner on contract levers, staffing commitments, service scope changes, and operational cadences; ensure governance mechanisms produce measurable outcomes.

• Workforce Management (WFM) operating model design (25 - 30%):

  • Establish the WFM approach across internal and BPO teams (forecasting, capacity planning, staffing assumptions, coverage standards).

  • Stand up a consistent planning cadence tied to business drivers (weekly/monthly/quarterly) and ensure partners operate to it.

• Operational reporting and executive narratives: Produce clear, decision-ready reporting on vendor health, capacity risk, and scaling constraints; translate operational signals into recommendations for leadership.

WE’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WITH:

• 5+ years in vendor/BPO operations management, support operations, or partner performance leadership in a scaled environment.

• Proven ability to run vendor governance: QBRs, SLA/KPI design, escalation paths, remediation plans, and cross-functional stakeholder management.

• Awareness of and some experience with workforce planning approaches—e.g., forecasting frameworks, capacity models, staffing strategies, and performance-to-plan systems. across global, multi-site support operations.

• Strong analytical and operational rigor: comfort working with data to define inputs/assumptions, evaluate tradeoffs, and drive outcomes (you do not need to be a data scientist, but you must be fluent).

• Familiarity with support tooling and operational systems (e.g., Salesforce Service Cloud or similar), and comfort partnering with Systems/Tooling to implement scalable processes.

• Exposure to WFM platforms and concepts (e.g., NICE, Assembled, Calabrio, Playvox, etc.)—with an emphasis on translating operational needs into platform requirements and governance.

• Strong communication skills and executive presence: ability to align diverse stakeholders, negotiate priorities, and drive accountability across internal teams and external partners.

• Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where you’re expected to build the structure, not just maintain the inherited ones.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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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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.