Account Director, Higher Education

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. 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. You will be expected to understand AI capabilities and limitations, integration patterns, data governance, privacy, security, and change management; partner effectively with technical experts; and remain accountable for measurable customer and revenue outcomes after signature. In this role, you will: 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 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 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 clear institutional value, credible technical plans, and practical 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 as a thoughtful partner at executive forums, industry events, customer advisory discussions, and the broader higher education ecosystem. Qualifications: 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. The technical depth to learn complex AI products, lead effective discovery, partner closely with technical teams, explain technical concepts accurately at both executive and practitioner altitudes, 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,