# Account Director, Higher Education

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** Unspecified
**Role:** Account Executive
**Salary:** $305k – $352k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** SaaS, Paas, Enterprise Sales, Account Planning, Pipeline Forecasting, Negotiation, Ai Platforms, Data Governance, Privacy, Cloud Security, Change Management, Procurement, Consumption Revenue, Cross-Functional Leadership
**Posted:** 2026-08-31

> Owns strategic higher education accounts across AMER, leading complex AI transformation sales from pipeline creation through deployment, adoption, and expansion. Requires 10+ years of enterprise SaaS/PaaS sales, direct higher education experience, technical fluency, and executive-level relationship skills.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Own and execute the AMER higher education territory and account strategy.
- Create pipeline and lead complex, multi-threaded new-business and expansion opportunities through procurement, deployment, adoption, value realization, and expansion.
- Engage 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, and Legal.
- Design evaluations, pilots, technical validation, executive business cases, production deployments, and adoption plans.
- Translate AI capabilities and limitations, integration approaches, governance requirements, privacy, security, and safety considerations into institutional value and transformation roadmaps.
- Own new-business, subscription, and consumption revenue; forecast pipeline and usage-based growth.
- Develop executive relationships and institutional champion coalitions.
- Bring higher education market insight into product, policy, partnership, and go-to-market strategy.
- Represent the company at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions, and within the higher education ecosystem.

## Requirements
- 10+ years selling platform-as-a-service and/or software-as-a-service solutions, with a record of meeting or exceeding meaningful revenue targets through complex, multi-year enterprise sales motions.
- Direct experience selling to higher education institutions or systems.
- Understanding of decentralized decision-making, academic and administrative stakeholders, governance, procurement, privacy, security, and change management.
- Experience owning consumption- or usage-based revenue, forecasting usage, driving adoption, creating use cases, and converting outcomes into expansion.
- Technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead discovery, partner with technical teams, and explain technical concepts to executive and practitioner audiences.
- Experience leading strategic transformations involving governance, change management, adoption, and measurable outcomes.
- Strong executive presence, structured communication, and ability to build trust across senior leaders, technical experts, faculty, administrators, and end users.
- Account planning, qualification, negotiation, forecasting, and cross-functional orchestration skills.
- High judgment, curiosity, resilience, and comfort with ambiguity, product change, and evolving customer needs.
- Mission-driven approach to responsible AI deployment.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Ability to move between institutional strategy discussions and working sessions on architecture, data, governance, rollout, and measurement.
- Experience creating repeatable sales and transformation plays while adapting to each institution’s operating model.
- Ability to balance optimism about AI with rigor around risks, tradeoffs, and implementation realities.

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