Sales Manager, Financial Services

OpenAI•New York, NY

About The Position

As Sales Manager, Financial Services, you will build and lead a team of Account Directors focused on landing and growing our largest Financial Services customers — including global banks, capital markets firms, asset and wealth managers, payments networks and fintechs, and (where relevant) insurers. You’ll be a hands-on front-line leader: coaching reps through complex opportunities, driving disciplined pipeline and forecasting practices, and creating the vertical GTM playbook for how OpenAI engages the Financial Services market. This foundational leadership role will shape how leading Financial Services organizations adopt AI and how we scale this motion across Enterprise.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in enterprise sales, customer success, or GTM leadership, with significant time leading at scale.
Proven track record of driving revenue growth in enterprise segments (e.g., $100M+ business units or equivalent scope).
Experience leading verticalized sales motions and building go-to-market plays from scratch.
Strong operational orientation: comfortable with capacity planning, pipeline rigor, forecasting, and data-driven execution.
Executive presence and credibility with C-level and EVPs; able to run complex, multi-threaded sales cycles.
Low-ego, culture-first leader who builds trust across teams and inspires followership.
Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change; thrives in a dynamic, startup-like environment inside a global company.
Public company experience is strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

Have deep Financial Services domain experience — selling into banks, capital markets, payments, wealth/asset management, fintechs, and/or insurers — with a strong understanding of regulatory, compliance, and risk environments.
Understand how Financial Services buyers evaluate AI, including model risk management, governance, data controls, and the standards required to deploy AI into customer-facing or regulated workflows.
Bring an existing network of senior Financial Services executives and can convene the right stakeholders around new AI initiatives.
Are a coach-first leader — energized by being in deals with your team, giving direct feedback, and watching reps level up.
Have helped build or refine a vertical GTM motion and are excited to codify operating rhythms, playbooks, and best practices from a relatively early starting point.
Are comfortable with technical depth — not an engineer, but fluent enough in AI, data, and API concepts to guide your team and earn credibility with technical stakeholders.
Are energized by big goals and ambiguity — large revenue targets, fast hiring, evolving products, and a rapidly changing market feel like an opportunity, not a deterrent.

Responsibilities

Recruit, develop, and lead a team of Enterprise Account Directors focused on new business and strategic expansion in Financial Services.
Create a strong coaching culture with frequent deal reviews, ride-alongs, and structured 1:1s that elevate performance.
Define and refine the GTM strategy for Financial Services accounts, aligned to our evolving territory and account coverage model.
Drive territory design, account prioritization, and coverage approaches that balance new customer acquisition with strategic expansion.
Establish clear operating rhythms for pipeline and forecast management, with explicit expectations on activity, coverage, and deal quality.
Hold the team accountable for building and closing high-quality, multi-stakeholder, multi-product opportunities that materially impact revenue.
Guide reps through complex, technical, and often unstructured opportunities in highly regulated environments, including nuanced security, privacy, data residency, and model-risk considerations.
Help translate AI and API capabilities into business value for Financial Services executives across lines of business and enterprise functions (e.g., risk, compliance, legal, audit, security, data, operations).
Navigate vendor governance and procurement processes common to Financial Services (e.g., third-party risk management, model governance, control frameworks), building plans that keep deals moving without compromising trust.
Partner with Marketing to shape the Financial Services story, campaigns, and events that generate qualified pipeline — and provide clear, data-driven feedback on what is and isn’t working.
Provide structured, prioritized feedback to Product on customer use cases, feature gaps, and deal blockers to inform roadmap, packaging, and pricing decisions.
Partner with Finance on deal structures, commercial terms, and approvals that balance customer needs with OpenAI’s revenue, margin, and risk objectives.
Work closely with Technical Success and post-sales teams to co-design solutions, align on implementation expectations, and ensure smooth handoffs that set customers up for long-term success.