Support Partner Manager

OpenAI OpenAI · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · User Operations

This role focuses on managing vendor relationships for customer support, with a significant portion dedicated to designing and implementing Workforce Management (WFM) frameworks. The goal is to scale support operations efficiently without proportional headcount increases, leveraging automation and agentic workflows. It involves performance management, risk management, and operational reporting for external support partners.

What you'd actually do

  1. End-to-end vendor leadership: Own day-to-day oversight, relationship health, and executive-level accountability for multiple support vendors/BPOs.
  2. Performance management & remediation: Define and manage SLA/KPI performance expectations, run WBRs/QBRs, identify performance gaps, and drive structured turnaround plans with clear owners and timelines.
  3. Escalation and risk management: Serve as the primary escalation point for vendor issues, including incident response, surge events, quality regressions, and continuity risks; ensure vendors have strong operational controls and playbooks.
  4. Commercial and operational governance: Partner on contract levers, staffing commitments, service scope changes, and operational cadences; ensure governance mechanisms produce measurable outcomes.
  5. Workforce Management (WFM) operating model design (25 - 30%): Establish the WFM approach across internal and BPO teams (forecasting, capacity planning, staffing assumptions, coverage standards). Stand up a consistent planning cadence tied to business drivers (weekly/monthly/quarterly) and ensure partners operate to it.

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years in vendor/BPO operations management, support operations, or partner performance leadership in a scaled environment.
  • Proven ability to run vendor governance: QBRs, SLA/KPI design, escalation paths, remediation plans, and cross-functional stakeholder management.
  • Awareness of and some experience with workforce planning approaches—e.g., forecasting frameworks, capacity models, staffing strategies, and performance-to-plan systems. across global, multi-site support operations.
  • Strong analytical and operational rigor: comfort working with data to define inputs/assumptions, evaluate tradeoffs, and drive outcomes (you do not need to be a data scientist, but you must be fluent).
  • Strong communication skills and executive presence: ability to align diverse stakeholders, negotiate priorities, and drive accountability across internal teams and external partners.
  • Comfort operating in fast-paced, ambiguous environments where you’re expected to build the structure, not just maintain the inherited ones.

Nice to have

  • Familiarity with support tooling and operational systems (e.g., Salesforce Service Cloud or similar), and comfort partnering with Systems/Tooling to implement scalable processes.
  • Exposure to WFM platforms and concepts (e.g., NICE, Assembled, Calabrio, Playvox, etc.)—with an emphasis on translating operational needs into platform requirements and governance.

What the JD emphasized

  • build the operating model that enables support to scale without linear headcount growth
  • architect automation systems and agentic workflows for scale
  • build the structure, not just maintain the inherited ones