About the Role
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 presidents, provosts, CIOs, CTOs, academic and administrative leaders, researchers, security teams, and procurement stakeholders to define priority use cases, build the technical and governance foundation for deployment, and translate institutional goals into a multi-year AI transformation roadmap.
Responsibilities
- Own and execute the AMER higher education territory and account strategy
- Create pipeline and lead complex, multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities
- Engage credibly 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
- Translate AI model and platform capabilities, limitations, integration approaches, governance requirements, privacy, security, and safety considerations into clear institutional value
- Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast pipeline and usage-based growth
- Develop durable executive relationships and a broad coalition of institutional champions
- Bring structured market insight from higher education customers into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy
- Represent OpenAI as a thoughtful partner at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions
- Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems
- Demonstrated ownership of consumption- or usage-based revenue
- Technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead effective discovery, partner closely with technical teams
- Experience leading strategic transformations rather than isolated point-solution sales
- Strong executive presence, structured communication, and the ability to earn trust across senior leaders
- Excellent account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills
- High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort operating through ambiguity