Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

Responsibilities

• Build and run the Incidents & Escalations function within User Operations as a player-coach.
• Serve as the active incident lead during live incidents and urgent escalations, coordinating with Engineering, Infrastructure, and Product teams.
• Own the alert intake and triage process for support, safety, and service-impacting issues.
• Manage incident communications, including internal executive briefings, customer-facing updates, and external status pages.
• Lead post-incident retrospectives to identify root causes and coordinate corrective actions.
• Develop long-term operating models, playbooks, and automation to improve incident response and reduce repeat issues.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in incident management, technical support, escalation management, SRE, or production operations.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in production, on-call, or high-urgency operational environments.
• 5+ years of leadership experience in a Support, Engineering, or similar technical environment.
• Proficiency with incident management and observability tools such as PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, or similar systems.
• Strong technical communication skills with the ability to remain calm and structured under high pressure.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience acting as an Incident Commander in complex, high-severity technical environments.
• Ability to balance hands-on incident execution with long-term systems and process building.
• Interest in using AI and automation to improve triage, reporting, and incident follow-through.

Benefits

• Competitive salary ($234K – $315K) and generous equity.
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Flexible PTO and paid parental leave.
• Daily meals in the office and mental health support.
• Annual learning and development stipend.

About the Company

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 AI capabilities and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products.