Account Director, Higher Education
About The Position
As an Account Director for Higher Education in AMER, you will own strategic relationships with colleges, universities, and higher education systems as they move from AI experimentation to responsible, institution-wide transformation. You will work with senior institutional leaders and stakeholders to define priority use cases, establish the technical and governance foundation for deployment, and translate institutional goals into multi-year AI transformation roadmaps. You will own the commercial and customer journey end to end, from territory strategy, pipeline creation, and executive alignment through evaluation, procurement, deployment, adoption, consumption, value realization, and expansion. This is a deeply technical, consultative sales role that requires understanding AI capabilities and limitations, integration patterns, data governance, privacy, security, and change management. You will partner with technical experts while remaining accountable for measurable customer and revenue outcomes after signature.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions, with a sustained record of meeting or exceeding meaningful revenue targets through complex, multi-year enterprise sales motions.
- Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems, with a strong understanding of decentralized decision-making, academic and administrative stakeholders, governance, procurement, privacy, security, and change management.
- Demonstrated ownership of consumption- or usage-based revenue, including forecasting usage, driving adoption, creating new use cases, and converting customer outcomes into expansion.
- Technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead effective discovery, partner closely with technical teams, explain technical concepts accurately to executive and practitioner audiences, and translate them into academic, operational, research, and commercial outcomes.
- Experience leading strategic transformations rather than isolated point-solution sales, including governance, change management, adoption, and measurable operational, academic, research, or user outcomes.
- Strong executive presence, structured communication, and the ability to earn trust across senior leaders, technical experts, faculty, administrators, and end users.
- Excellent account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills.
- High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort operating through ambiguity, product change, and evolving customer needs.
- A mission-driven approach to deploying AI responsibly and helping institutions build durable capability rather than short-lived pilots.
Responsibilities
- Own and execute the AMER higher education territory and account strategy, prioritizing institutions where OpenAI can support meaningful, responsible, and scalable transformation.
- Create pipeline and lead complex, multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities from first engagement through procurement, deployment, adoption, and value realization.
- Engage with presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic leaders, researchers, administrators, security teams, legal, procurement, finance, and end-user champions.
- Lead cross-functional pursuit and account teams across Solutions Engineering, Customer Success, Product, Research, Security, Legal, and other functions to design evaluations, pilots, technical validation, executive business cases, production deployments, and adoption plans.
- Translate AI model and platform capabilities, limitations, integration approaches, governance requirements, privacy, security, and safety considerations into institutional value, technical plans, and transformation roadmaps.
- Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast pipeline and usage-based growth; and use adoption, value realization, and expansion signals to manage the business.
- Develop durable executive relationships and a broad coalition of institutional champions across decentralized stakeholder groups.
- Bring structured market insight from higher education customers into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy.
- Represent OpenAI at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions, and across the broader higher education ecosystem.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
