Senior Manager, Strategic Sourcing (Product & Engineering Technology)

About the Team

OpenAI Finance is responsible for ensuring the organization is set up for success in pursuit of its mission.

The Procurement team advises our business partners to make the best investments, ensures we acquire the resources needed for growth, and enables our mission through efficient procurement practices.

About the Role

We're seeking a Strategic Sourcing Senior Manager to lead technical procurement across software, cloud services, infrastructure, developer tools, APIs, and security technologies that power our research and product environments. Reporting to the Head of Strategic Sourcing, you’ll partner with technical teams to shape and drive sourcing strategies, as well as structure and negotiate complex, scalable agreements. You’ll enable OpenAI to move quickly, boldly, and responsibly, and help us achieve our mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Lead sourcing and negotiation efforts for software, infrastructure, APIs, and security services that directly support OpenAI’s product development and research.

• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, Research, and Security teams to understand technical requirements and translate them into sourcing strategies and commercial models.

• Design and execute category strategies that anticipate growth across compute, observability, orchestration, developer tooling, and security infrastructure.

• Negotiate custom, usage-based, and non-standard agreements, focusing on flexibility, scalability, and alignment with how technical teams actually build and operate.

• Collaborate with Legal, Security, and Engineering to evaluate vendors, address data protection and architecture needs, and close contracts quickly and safely.

• Support infrastructure and cloud spend governance, helping teams plan for growth, optimize costs, and manage vendor performance.

• Serve as a sourcing advisor to technical leadership, providing clarity on commercial risks, options, and best practices.

• Continuously improve sourcing processes to keep pace with OpenAI’s speed and technical complexity.

You might thrive in this role if you have: 

• 10+ years in software, cloud, and technical procurement, ideally in high-scale, product-led, or research-driven environments.

• Technical fluency to engage credibly with engineers and security teams on infrastructure concepts like cloud architecture, distributed systems, APIs, and developer platforms.

• A track record of structuring and negotiating non-standard, usage-based, API-driven, or deeply technical agreements.

• Strong collaboration and communication skills with diverse stakeholders—such as Engineering, Product, Security, Legal, and Finance—with a focus on clarity, consistency, and responsiveness.

• Analytical rigor to interpret usage data, pricing models, and growth forecasts to inform sourcing decisions and negotiation strategies.

• Experience managing vendor relationships across renewals, performance reviews, escalations, and compliance.

• An autonomous, ownership mindset to independently drive work forward with urgency and precision, and balances detail with clarity.

• Strong alignment with OpenAI’s values and commitment to enabling its research and product goals through effective sourcing.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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

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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.