The role
ABOUT THE TEAM
Strategic Sourcing & Procurement helps OpenAI secure the products, services, and partnerships that support our research, build our products, and grow our business. We work with teams across the company to make sound commercial decisions and move important work forward.
As OpenAI grows, we are rethinking how sourcing works: bringing expertise into decisions earlier, simplifying contracting, and using AI to give Procurement more time for judgment and strategic work. What we learn internally—and through our supplier and enterprise-buyer relationships—can also inform better products, partnerships, and industry adoption.
ABOUT THE ROLE
We’re looking for a senior leader to head Sourcing Enablement & Delivery, leading sourcing operational delivery, contracting enablement, and AI transformation—and building Procurement’s contribution to OpenAI’s commercial growth. You will build the teams, systems, service model, and cross-functional partnerships that enable sourcing and contracting at scale, helping teams move quickly without losing commercial discipline or accountability.
You will partner with GTM, Sales, and Partnerships to develop Procurement’s contribution to OpenAI adoption and commercial growth. Bring procurement-industry knowledge, buyer insights, and lessons from internal AI use into customer engagement, product feedback, and opportunities across the procurement ecosystem.
Reporting to the Head of Strategic Sourcing, you will manage the Sourcing Delivery and Contract Management leaders and shape this new function’s priorities, team, and measures of success.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
PRIORITIES AND WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
- A focused roadmap: clear choices about what to build first, what to defer, and how progress will be measured.
- Stronger delivery: capable leaders and teams, faster execution, less rework, and fewer unresolved ownership gaps.
- AI adoption: sustained use of AI-enabled capabilities, with measurable gains in quality, capacity, and user experience.
- Commercial results: increased OpenAI adoption across the procurement industry and a measurable contribution to commercial growth, consistent with independent supplier selection and purchasing decisions.
IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL:
- Build and lead the organization. Hire and develop managers, coach performance, and build succession and leadership depth. Decide how employees, contractors, delivery partners, and AI share the work. Hold leaders accountable for results, capacity, and team health.
- Own sourcing enablement and delivery operations. Set service commitments and quality standards with the Delivery and Contract Management leaders. Match support to deal complexity and risk, and use internal customer feedback to improve the service. Category and Sourcing leads retain ownership of their strategies and deals, including supplier selection, negotiations, and purchasing.
- Lead the sourcing operating rhythm. Bring demand, priorities, and capacity into one forward plan, informed by workload and performance data. Work with category leaders to make tradeoffs, resolve dependencies, and follow through on commitments. Provide inputs to Procurement-wide planning and functional business reviews.
- Strengthen contracting. Partner with Legal and Procurement Operations/COE on contract lifecycle management, approved templates, and negotiation playbooks that improve quality and free category teams to focus on strategic deals.
- Lead RACI development. Define responsibilities, decision rights, handoffs, and escalation paths within Procurement and across partner teams. Define how the team prioritizes work, allocates resources, and resolves delivery issues.
- Create mechanisms to bring sourcing into decisions earlier: connect business demand, supplier activity, and renewals—including work outside formal intake—with Sourcing teams, so options can be shaped before commitments and Finance and cross-functional teams can have better visibility.
- Build and prove AI-enabled ways of working. Own use-case priorities, adoption, and business outcomes for sourcing and contracting experiences that begin in ChatGPT and connect to trusted enterprise systems. Partner with Finance Enterprise Technology on technical delivery and with Legal, Security, and Operations on controls and support, including preserving access restrictions and contractual commitments. Turn what works into reusable capabilities, demonstrations, and product feedback.
- Define Procurement’s commercial-enablement approach with GTM, Partnerships, Legal, and Compliance including program scope, decision rights, purchasing independence, and information-sharing boundaries. Lead Procurement’s analysis, coordination, and follow-through for approved programs; GTM owns customer sales. Maintain independent purchasing decision-making and identify and escalate any proposed linkage between OpenAI’s purchasing commitments and customer sales.
- Help define goals and measures of success for Procurement’s contribution to OpenAI adoption and commercial growth with Sourcing leadership and cross-functional partners.
- Bring procurement-buyer expertise into GTM. Own this team’s buyer insights and use cases. Work with Marketing, Sales, Product, Customer Success, and Partnerships to shape demonstrations, industry content, and customer conversations, using examples approved for external use.
- Drive OpenAI adoption across the procurement industry. Work with Sourcing leadership, partners and GTM to explore how Procurement third-parties and partners can adopt and distribute OpenAI capabilities. Contribute industry expertise and evidence from internal use; GTM and Partnerships own commercialization.
- Partner with Legal and Compliance to embed business-integrity and confidentiality safeguards; implement required disclosures, recusals, and independent-decision making arrangements.
YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU:
- Have 12+ years of experience in strategic sourcing, procurement, vendor management, or commercial leadership, with strong judgment about supplier choices, negotiations, contracts, and risk.
- Have built or transformed a procurement capability through rapid growth or change, with clear evidence of better execution, commercial outcomes, or user experience.
- Have managed managers and developed strong teams through hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and thoughtful use of internal and external capacity.
- Have worked in or closely with marketing, sales, or commercial teams, ideally serving procurement buyers. You can turn customer needs into use cases and business cases, and deliver commercial results with partner teams.
- Know the procurement industry—its buyers, technology providers, service firms, and buying priorities. You understand how to sell to Procurement, including how buyers assess risk, negotiate, and secure internal support.
- Use industry analysts, market research, buyer conversations, and professional networks to form a point of view on emerging trends and inform roadmaps, partnerships, and GTM priorities.
- Have turned AI, automation, or enterprise technology into capabilities people use. You can work with technical partners, drive adoption, measure improvements, and recognize where human judgment remains essential.
- Can set direction when the path is not defined. You prioritize work and resources, explain tradeoffs plainly, and earn support from teams you do not manage. You are curious about AI and willing to test, learn, and change course.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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.
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