Strategic Delivery Lead, International Public Sector

About the team The OpenAI for Government team is a dynamic, mission-driven group leveraging frontier AI to transform how public institutions achieve their missions. Our team works to empower public servants with secure, compliant AI tools and mission-aligned deployments that meet government technical, policy, security, and sovereignty requirements with strong reliability and safety. As part of the OpenAI for Government team, you will work with public sector institutions globally outside the United States to accelerate responsible adoption of frontier AI. If you are passionate about helping governments serve their communities more effectively, we want you on our team. About the Role The Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL) for International Public Sector will lead some of OpenAI’s most complex and high-impact deployments with public sector customers outside the United States. You will work with senior government, multilateral, and partner stakeholders to turn hard institutional and mission problems into practical deployments on the OpenAI Platform API and ChatGPT Enterprise. The role is highly cross-functional and customer-facing: you will partner with Research, Engineering, Go-to-Market, Global Affairs, Legal, Security, and external stakeholders to align scope, unblock delivery, and communicate progress at every level, from technical teams to C-suite. You will own and drive delivery workstreams led by specialist internal technical and engineering teams, ensuring clear problem-framing, milestones, risk management, issue resolution, and translation between public-sector objectives and technical solutions. As a trusted generalist with strong technical fluency, you will move between strategy, technical scoping and discovery, delivery planning, adoption, governance, relationship management, and issue resolution without supervision. This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Accountability for contractual milestones and acceptance criteria sits with you. Success requires excellent judgement, adaptable programme leadership and management, executive presence, and the ability to turn broad leadership guidance into practical action while escalating when needed. In this role, you will: - Forge partnerships with public sector leaders and AI users globally, in line with strategic priorities, to deliver the most impactful AI and AGI use cases. - Serve as the accountable lead for international public sector engagements tied to clear outcomes, customer milestones, adoption metrics, and commercial commitments. - Translate between technical teams and business, policy, security, and operational stakeholders, clearly communicating progress, risks, requirements, and dependencies. - Work with government departments, strategic partners, multilateral institutions, operational delivery partners, and policy/security stakeholders to translate responsible AI use cases into actionable delivery plans. - Partner with technical teams to scope projects, guide technical direction, anticipate blockers, and align teams. - Operate as a generalist across opportunity development, pilot shaping, delivery governance, adoption, and risk management as the team scales. - Exercise judgement and initiative under ambiguity, staying aligned with leadership priorities without day-to-day direction. - Establish best practices around milestone tracking, internal coordination, customer governance, and delivery operations at scale. - Lead regular progress reviews with international public sector stakeholders, ensuring transparency and confidence in delivery. - Identify delivery, policy, security, procurement, data, and stakeholder risks early and work cross-functionally to mitigate blockers and maintain programme velocity. - Navigate ambiguity and evolving requirements with composure, helping internal and external teams stay aligned. - Help shape the future of how OpenAI engages with international public sector customers through reusable delivery practices, responsible deployment patterns, and milestone-based programmes. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 10+ years in public sector consulting, delivery leadership, transformation, enterprise technology, or senior programme management. - Are based in the UK or EU, or otherwise able to support public sector customers globally outside the United States, and are willing to travel up to 50% to work on-site with customers and partners. - For UK-based candidates, hold or be eligible for UK SC/DV or comparable clearance; EU-based candidates should have regulated public sector experience. - Have experience leading organisational transformation initiatives (AI, digital, technology, or business transformation) directly with government, public sector, or highly regulated institutions. - Have led complex programmes in enterprise SaaS, AI/ML, consulting, systems integration, gov tech, or transformation environments. - Have a proven track record influencing and shaping customer