About the job
The Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL) for the Intelligence Community will identify, shape, and deliver OpenAI’s highest-impact deployments for U.S. intelligence organizations. You will help IC customers translate mission priorities—including all-source analysis, intelligence production, collection management, open-source and geospatial exploitation, cyber threat analysis, knowledge discovery, and analyst productivity—into secure, technically feasible AI deployments built on the OpenAI API and enterprise products. The role is highly cross-functional and customer-facing: you will partner with Research, Engineering, Go-to-Market, Security, Legal, Privacy, and government mission, acquisition, and technical stakeholders to align on scope, remove delivery obstacles, and communicate progress from working teams to agency leadership.
Responsibilities
- Build trusted relationships with IC mission owners, analysts, collectors, operators, Chief Information Officers, Chief Data Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, and acquisition leaders to identify and prioritize high-value, mission-ready AI use cases.
- Own delivery of complex IC engagements from discovery and technical shaping through pilot, security authorization, production deployment, customer acceptance, and sustained adoption; maintain accountability for contractual milestones, integrated schedules, scope, and mission outcomes.
- Translate intelligence mission requirements, analytic tradecraft, data constraints, and security policies into clear technical requirements, architectural decisions, delivery plans, and executive-level communications; lead technical exchanges, design reviews, and customer briefings.
- Partner with IC elements, mission integrators, cloud and infrastructure providers, industry partners, and academia to develop AI applications for intelligence analysis, collection and exploitation workflows, cyber defense, multilingual research, knowledge retrieval, and other priority missions.
- Lead cross-functional teams spanning Forward Deployed Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Research, Product, Security, Legal, Privacy, and customer mission teams to design, evaluate, and deliver generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic workflow solutions.
- Establish delivery operating rhythms, program roadmaps, milestone and dependency tracking, risk and decision governance, customer reporting, and measurable indicators of mission impact, user adoption, model quality, and operational readiness.
Qualifications
Minimum
- Have 10+ years of experience leading technical programs, enterprise AI or cloud deployments, intelligence mission transformation, or national security consulting, including substantial direct delivery experience with U.S. Intelligence Community customers.
- Hold an active U.S. Government TS/SCI clearance.
- Are willing to travel up to 50% and work on-site with IC customers in secure facilities to build trusted relationships and understand mission, user, and operating-environment needs.
- Understand Intelligence Community missions, organizations, operating models, and analytic tradecraft, including experience supporting agencies or elements such as ODNI, CIA, NSA, DIA, NGA, or NRO.
- Have led complex generative AI, AI/ML, enterprise SaaS, API, data-platform, cloud, or digital-transformation programs from discovery through operational deployment in mission-sensitive environments.
- Bring executive presence and a record of advising agency leadership, mission owners, contracting officers, and senior technical stakeholders; can influence decisions, resolve ambiguity, and build alignment across government and industry teams.
- Translate mission outcomes into requirements, statements of work, integrated schedules, acceptance criteria, evaluation plans, and measurable success metrics such as analyst time saved, workflow adoption, quality, and decision advantage.
- Understand modern AI solution architectures, including large language models, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, data integration, model evaluation, and the security, reliability, and adoption considerations involved in operational deployment.
- Apply responsible-AI practices appropriate to intelligence missions, including human-in-the-loop review, analytic objectivity, source and data provenance, privacy and civil liberties safeguards, explainability, adversarial testing, and ongoing model monitoring.
Preferred
- An existing full-scope polygraph and the ability to meet customer-specific access requirements are strongly preferred.
- Existing IC customer relationships are beneficial but not required.
- Have experience delivering systems across multiple classification levels and navigating secure cloud and restricted environments; familiarity with IC enterprise IT, identity and access controls, data governance, cross-domain constraints, RMF/ATO processes, and ICD 503 is valued.