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. 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 workflows and launch and scale new programs. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. 1-2 weeks of travel per quarter may be required. 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. - 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. - 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…