← Back to jobs

Dedicated Support Engineer - Toronto

openai

Ontario - Remote
Technical Support Product Owner

Job Score

90 pts
On-site model (+70) Technical Support (+10) Product Owner (+10)

About the Team

OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises.

About the Role

The Support Engineering team works closely with Engineering, Product, Technical Success, Go-to-Market, and other teams to deliver an exceptional experience for our most strategic customers. We combine deep technical troubleshooting with durable customer context, proactive reliability work, and clear ownership during critical moments. We use automation, agents, and our own technology to help build the future of technical support.

We’re looking for experienced, deeply curious technical problem-solvers to serve as trusted support partners for our Premium Support customers. You’ll work directly with customers on novel, ambiguous, and high-impact technical issues, using logs, telemetry, reproduction, and systems-level investigation to isolate causes and drive issues toward resolution.

Beyond resolving individual issues, you’ll use your deep understanding of OpenAI’s infrastructure and products, together with each customer’s architecture and operating context, to anticipate risk and make their workloads more resilient over time. You’ll proactively monitor integrations, identify emerging failure patterns and architectural breakpoints, and work with customers and internal teams to address them before they become incidents. Success means that as a customer’s workloads mature and scale, the day-to-day effort required to support them decreases through better monitoring, runbooks, automation, and preventative improvements.

This Toronto-based role is currently remote and is expected to transition to an in-office arrangement.

In this role, you will:

  • Work directly with Premium Support customers to troubleshoot their most complex technical issues, including API failures, integration challenges, authentication errors, unexpected product behavior, performance degradation, and production incidents.

  • Provide end-to-end technical ownership by analyzing logs and system behavior, reproducing errors, testing hypotheses, and isolating the likely failure domain. Where possible, you’ll identify the root cause before escalating to Engineering; where that is not possible, you’ll provide a clear hypothesis and the evidence needed to accelerate Engineering’s investigation.

  • Become a trusted expert on OpenAI’s products and systems, serving as a critical escalation point and a technical backstop for our most strategic customers.

  • Own the customer-specific response to high-impact incidents. You’ll assess severity and business impact, initiate the appropriate response path, coordinate cross-functional responders, maintain clear ownership, and ensure issues move through mitigation, resolution, and post-incident follow-through.

  • Communicate clearly and proactively during periods of uncertainty, providing accurate updates to customer technical teams, business stakeholders, executives, and internal partners.

  • Develop a detailed understanding of each customer’s architecture, integrations, dependencies, critical workloads, and operational constraints. You’ll document this context and make it accessible to Support, Product, and Engineering teams.

  • Partner with Go-to-Market and Technical Success teams to understand the business importance of customer workloads and ensure that relevant commercial context informs severity, prioritization, and communication without bypassing established support processes.

  • Represent Support Engineering in relevant customer meetings, including QBRs, and partner closely with account teams to communicate technical health, surface risks and blockers early, coordinate follow-up, and provide customers and internal stakeholders with clear, proactive updates.

  • Monitor customer integrations and support trends to identify emerging risks, recurring failure patterns, and readiness gaps before they become major escalations.

  • Prepare for important launches, migrations, traffic increases, and business events by developing account-specific runbooks, validating escalation paths, coordinating support readiness, and providing heightened monitoring where needed.

  • Lead or contribute to incident reviews and postmortems, identify opportunities to prevent recurrence, and track corrective actions through closure.

  • Translate recurring customer pain into clear, evidence-backed feedback for Product and Engineering, with a particular focus on improving the reliability and performance of existing products, integrations, and deployments.

  • Turn what you learn from customer investigations into scalable improvements, including troubleshooting guides, monitoring, internal tooling, support workflows, and AI-powered automation.

  • Help shape the operating model, technical standards, and tooling for Premium Support as the function grows globally.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have significant experience in Support Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or another role involving hands-on diagnosis of complex production issues.

  • Have expert-level troubleshooting skills and a strong track record of resolving ambiguous technical problems across APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and enterprise integrations.

  • Are comfortable working with logs, metrics, traces, API requests, authentication flows, and customer-provided code or configurations to understand system behavior and test hypotheses.

  • Have experience leading or playing a central role in customer-impacting incidents, including severity assessment, technical coordination, stakeholder communication, root-cause analysis, and post-incident follow-through.

  • Can write code or scripts to reproduce issues, interrogate systems, automate repetitive work, and improve internal tools. Experience with Python, JavaScript, or similar languages is valuable.

  • Can communicate complex technical issues clearly to engineers, customer technical teams, business stakeholders, and senior leaders—especially when information is incomplete or evolving.

  • Build strong, high-trust relationships with customers and cross-functional partners while maintaining clear and scalable ownership boundaries.

  • Look beyond the immediate issue to identify patterns, improve the system, and prevent the same problem from recurring.

  • Thrive in ambiguity, update quickly as new information emerges, and are willing to learn whatever is needed to get the job done.

  • Bring a humble, team-first mindset, strong judgment, and a genuine eagerness to help both customers and colleagues succeed.

  • Are excited to use OpenAI’s products, agents, and emerging AI capabilities to transform how technical support operates at scale.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

What did you think of this job?

Comments 0

Want to leave a comment?
Sign in or create your account in seconds to join the discussion.
Loading comments...

About Technical Support

Technical Support is essential to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. Support professionals resolve technical issues, document solutions, and identify patterns that can lead to product improvements.

Key skills include troubleshooting, customer service, technical documentation, ITIL knowledge, and ticketing tools (Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom).

Technical support has evolved from a reactive to a proactive function, with high-level professionals working in Customer Engineering and Support Engineering.

About Product Owner

The Product Owner (PO) is the professional responsible for maximizing the value of the product delivered by the development team. They act as the voice of the customer and stakeholders, managing and prioritizing the product backlog, defining clear user stories, and ensuring the team works on the most valuable items for the business.

Key skills include backlog management, user story writing, prioritization (Mascow, RICE), agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban), and stakeholder communication. Knowledge of tools like Jira, Trello, Azure DevOps, and Miro is essential.

Product Owners are highly sought-after professionals in the technology market, working collaboratively with Scrum Masters, Product Managers, and engineering teams to drive agility and continuous value delivery.

Discover Other Areas

Understand the scope of work, key skills, and tools used in different career areas.

About SEO Analyst

The SEO Analyst is the professional responsible for optimizing websites for search engines, increasing organic visibility and qualified traffic. With the growing importance of digital marketing, SEO professionals are fundamental to any online presence strategy.

Key skills include on-page and off-page SEO, technical SEO, keyword research, SEO audits, link building, optimized content creation, and metrics analysis. Tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, and Screaming Frog are essential for daily work.

SEO analysts in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who master technical SEO, Core Web Vitals, and data-driven content strategies. The field offers opportunities from junior analyst to head of SEO, with a focus on organic growth, domain authority, and return on investment.

About Photography

The Photography area encompasses the capture, editing, and processing of static images for commercial, advertising, editorial, or artistic purposes. Professionals in this field master lighting techniques, visual composition, camera and lens operation, as well as the use of specialized editing and post-processing software such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.

About Content Manager

The Content Manager is the professional responsible for leading the entire content strategy, production, and management of an organization. They define the editorial strategy, coordinate writing teams, and ensure content aligns with business goals and brand identity.

Key skills include content strategy, editorial planning, content audit, buyer persona, customer journey, content ops, content governance, performance metrics (ROI, engagement, organic traffic), and team management. Knowledge of WordPress, Contentful, Notion, and analytics tools is a differentiator.

Content Managers in technology companies are highly valued, especially those who can align content with conversion funnels, lead multidisciplinary teams, and use data to optimize editorial strategy. The field offers opportunities from content manager to head of content, with a focus on strategy, quality, and scale.

About Web3

The Web3 area represents the new phase of the decentralized internet, built on blockchain technology. Web3 professionals create decentralized applications (dApps), interact with smart contracts, manage digital assets (cryptocurrencies and NFTs), and utilize DeFi (Decentralized Finance) protocols, revolutionizing how data, ownership, and finance are managed online.

About Public Relations

The Public Relations (PR) area focuses on managing the reputation, image, and communication of an organization with its various stakeholders (such as clients, investors, employees, media, and the community). PR professionals develop corporate communication strategies, manage media relations (press relations), organize institutional events, and work in image crisis prevention and management.

Career Guides

Technology Career Guide

Planning, skills, interviews, and professional growth in IT, Data Science, DevOps, and Product.

Read full guide →

Design Career Guide

UX/UI, Graphic Design, Product Design. Portfolio, tools, interviews, and growth in the Design field.

Read full guide →

Marketing Career Guide

SEO, Paid Media, Growth, Content Marketing. Certifications, tools, and strategies to grow in Digital Marketing.

Read full guide →

Finance Career Guide

Financial market, investments, corporate finance, certifications, and strategies to grow in the financial field.

Read full guide →

Communication Career Guide

Journalism, PR, Corporate Communication, Content Marketing, and Multimedia Production.

Read full guide →

Administration Career Guide

Business Management, HR, Logistics, Consulting, Project Management, and Entrepreneurship.

Read full guide →

Data Career Guide

Data Science, Data Engineering, BI, Machine Learning, and AI. From training to the job market.

Read full guide →

Product Career Guide

Product Management, Product Ownership, Agile, Scrum, and OKRs. From strategy to execution.

Read full guide →

Tech & Remote Glossary

Stop getting lost in interviews and job descriptions

The job market, especially within tech and global companies, has developed its own dialect. Not understanding these acronyms can make you lose valuable opportunities or poorly negotiate your contract. To end this problem, we created the Definitive Glossary for the Remote Professional.

🏢 Work Models & Routine

Async (Asynchronous Work)
A communication model where responses don't need to be immediate. Instead of back-to-back meetings, the team relies on well-structured documents, threads, and messages. It's the gold standard for global companies spanning multiple time zones.
Sync (Synchronous Work)
The opposite of Async. It requires the team to be online and available at the same time for meetings, live chats, and real-time collaboration.
Daily / Stand-up
A quick daily meeting (usually 15 minutes) common in Agile (Scrum) methodologies. The team answers three questions: What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? Are there any blockers?
All-Hands / Town Hall
A company-wide meeting involving all employees. Usually led by the founders (C-Levels) to present results, new goals, and answer team questions.
1:1 (One-on-One)
A recurring individual meeting between a professional and their direct manager. It is used for career alignment, feedback, and problem-solving, not just for project status updates.

💰 Contracts, Benefits & Compensation

PTO (Paid Time Off)
Instead of strict, categorized leave policies, modern US companies usually offer a flexible pool of days (e.g., 20 days of PTO, or even "Unlimited PTO") that you can use for vacations, sick days, or personal matters, while receiving your regular compensation.
Equity / Stock Options
Company ownership. The startup offers you the right to buy shares at a heavily discounted strike price in the future. If the company grows, goes public, or is acquired, these shares can be highly lucrative.
Vesting (Vesting Schedule)
The rule that controls your Equity. It usually lasts 4 years. You don't get all the shares on day one; you "earn" them gradually as you stay with the company. A "1-year Cliff" means you must stay for at least one year to receive your first batch of shares.
RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)
Unlike Stock Options (where you have the right to buy the stock), RSUs are actual shares the company grants you as a bonus or part of your compensation package, following a strict Vesting schedule.
Independent Contractor (1099 / B2B)
The most common international hiring model for global talent working for US companies. You act as a service provider (business-to-business), receiving the gross salary (often six-figure compensation) without standard local payroll tax deductions at the source.

🤖 Recruitment & Hiring Process

ATS (Applicant Tracking System)
The "robot" that reads your resume. Software like Greenhouse, Ashby, and Workday are used to filter candidates by keywords before a human even looks at the document. (Pro tip: this is why your resume must be clean, semantic, and have the right keywords).
JD (Job Description)
The document that lists the responsibilities, technical requirements, and benefits of the open position.
Cultural Fit
The interview stage that evaluates if your core values, communication style, and worldview align with the company's culture. This is the ultimate test of your Soft Skills.
Onboarding
The integration process. It's the period of your first few weeks at the company, where you get your access credentials, learn about the culture, study the internal documentation, and understand how the product works.

🚀 How to use this to your advantage?

The secret isn't just knowing what these acronyms mean, but using them actively. If during an interview for a premium tech role you ask, "How does your PTO policy and Vesting schedule work?", the recruiter will immediately perceive you as a high-level professional, familiar with the global market standards.

The remote job market requires preparation. And having the right vocabulary is the first big step to securing six-figure proposals and standing out among thousands of applicants.

Expert Tip

The Back-End Development Market

The Back-End Development Market: Barriers, Opportunities, and the Path to the Top

Behind every brilliant application, revolutionary artificial intelligence, or successful fintech, there is an invisible and robust ecosystem. Welcome to the Back-End universe.

The Modern Back-End Paradox: Did AI Steal the Jobs?

With the rise of tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, many junior developers wonder if the Back-End career is threatened. The short answer is: no. In fact, it has evolved.

Artificial Intelligence has made writing basic "CRUD" (Create, Read, Update, Delete) code trivial. However, the market no longer pays six-figure salaries for writing repetitive code. The global market is actively hunting for Software Engineers—professionals who understand architecture, resilience, latency, and scalability. The Back-End didn't die; the bar was simply raised.

Barriers to Entry: What Separates Juniors from Seniors

Entering Back-End development today requires overcoming technical barriers that go far beyond mastering a programming language (like Java, C#, Go, or Python). Key barriers include:

  • System Design: Knowing how to design a system that supports 100 users is easy. Designing one that handles 1 million requests per second requires deep knowledge of load balancing, caching (Redis/Memcached), and message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka).
  • Data Complexity: The debate is no longer just "SQL vs. NoSQL". It is about data modeling, replication, sharding, and how to avoid database bottlenecks in distributed systems.
  • Security: With data breaches costing millions, companies require developers to master security practices from day one. Not knowing the vulnerabilities listed by the OWASP Top 10 is a dealbreaker for premium remote roles.
  • DevOps and Cloud Culture: The modern Back-End developer must understand containerization (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Golden Opportunities: Where is the Money?

For those who overcome these barriers, the market is a blue ocean of opportunities, especially for US/Global Remote work.

  • Migration to Microservices and Serverless: Corporate giants continue to dismantle legacy monoliths. Professionals who understand the patterns described by Martin Fowler are highly sought after.
  • High-Performance Languages: While traditional languages maintain their corporate strength, the use of Go (Golang) and Rust has skyrocketed for systems requiring massive concurrency and low memory footprint (Green Computing).
  • AI Infrastructure: AI models don't run in a vacuum. There is a massive demand for Back-End engineers proficient in Python and C++ to build data pipelines (MLOps) and the APIs that serve these models in real time.

Success Stories: Architectural Decisions That Changed the Game

True Back-End engineering shines when solving impossible problems. Let's look at real-market examples:

The Discord Case (Migration to Rust): Discord faced latency spikes in its core Read States service, originally written in Go. Because Go's Garbage Collector caused critical millisecond freezes, the team rewrote the service in Rust, completely eliminating latency spikes and supporting trillions of messages with absurd efficiency. This proved the value of choosing the right tool for performance limits.

The Netflix Case (Pioneering Microservices): Netflix transformed a monolithic system that broke under pressure into an architecture of thousands of independently managed microservices. They pioneered the concept of Chaos Engineering, purposely shutting down production servers to ensure their Back-End was resilient to failure.

Practical Tips: How to Land Premium Global Jobs

  1. Master the Fundamentals: Before learning the trendy framework of the month, study data structures, algorithms, and time complexity (Big-O Notation). This is exactly what will be tested in high-level technical interviews (Whiteboard interviews).
  2. Build a Problem-Focused Portfolio: A GitHub repository with a "To-Do List" won't impress anyone. Build an API that handles asynchronous image processing, create a scalable URL shortener, or engineer a messaging system using WebSockets and Redis.
  3. Study Real Cloud Architecture: Get solutions-based certifications (like AWS Certified Developer or Solutions Architect). These serve as a "Seal of Approval" to bypass strict Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby.
  4. Flawless Technical Communication: According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the highest-paying roles require asynchronous global collaboration. Your code documentation, commit messages, and PR reviews must be pristine and professional.

Verdict: Is a Career in Back-End Worth It?

Absolutely. If you are an analytical person who loves solving complex puzzles and cares about the security and efficiency of things no one sees, the Back-End is your place.

It is a career virtually immune to visual fads. While Front-End libraries change every few years, the fundamentals of relational databases, networks, and operating systems remain the same. It is a rock-solid foundation for a highly lucrative and globalized career.