Support Partner 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 Partner Manager (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. In this role you will drive: - 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. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU HAVE: - 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 p

• To increase your chances of getting hired as a Support Partner Manager at OpenAI, make sure you have hands-on experience with Salesforce and can provide specific examples of how you've used it to automate workflows and scale support operations in previous roles.
• Create a portfolio that showcases your ability to resolve complex technical issues and provides technical guidance to customers, highlighting your experience working with diverse customer backgrounds and maturity levels, from startups to global enterprises.
• Familiarize yourself with OpenAI's products and services, and be prepared to discuss how you would support customers in maximizing value and adoption, as well as how you would collaborate with cross-functional teams such as Sales, Technical Success, Product, and Engineering.
• Develop a thorough understanding of OpenAI's breakneck shipping cadence and growth, and be prepared to discuss how you would architect automation systems and agentic workflows to maintain exceptional support at scale, providing concrete examples of how you've achieved this in previous roles.
• Prepare to discuss your experience with data-driven decision making and how you've used metrics and analytics to inform your support strategies, as well as your ability to communicate complex technical information to non-technical stakeholders, such as customers and product managers.
• Be prepared to negotiate your salary based on industry standards for Support Partner Managers in San Francisco, taking into account OpenAI's company culture and values, and be ready to discuss your expectations for professional development and growth within the company.