Biz Ops and Finance Lead - Custom Silicon

About the Team

The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support the organization's long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest impact outcomes. 

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a Biz Ops and Finance Lead - Custom Silicon to drive strategic decision-making and financial planning for our custom silicon initiatives. This role involves collaborating with engineering, product management, and infrastructure teams to evaluate major investments in custom chip design, compute hardware, and efficiency programs. The ideal candidate will combine deep financial expertise with strong business acumen to influence OpenAI’s long-term compute strategy.

As OpenAI scales its compute infrastructure to power the next generation of AI, this role ensures our investments in custom silicon and compute hardware are financially sound and strategically aligned. This is an opportunity to shape the financial future of AI and contribute to advancements in machine learning hardware.

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.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with engineering and infrastructure leadership to guide investment decisions across OpenAI’s custom silicon roadmap.

• Develop financial models, multi-year ROI & NPV analyses, and risk assessments to support substantial investments in custom silicon and compute hardware.

• Assess trade-offs in silicon performance, total cost of ownership (TCO), and long-term compute infrastructure scalability.

• Lead financial planning for chip development, compute server investments, and infrastructure efficiency programs.

• Create forecasting frameworks in collaboration with engineering, data science, and supply chain teams to inform OpenAI’s compute scaling strategy.

• Work closely with TPMs, supply chain operations, and product management to align technical roadmaps with financial sustainability.

• Establish standardized evaluation criteria for R&D investment approvals and compute efficiency initiatives.

• Identify and implement savings opportunities within OpenAI’s custom silicon development and compute infrastructure investments.

• Mentor junior team members, fostering a strong finance and business operations culture within OpenAI.

You might thrive in this role if you: 

• 7+ years of experience in strategic finance, business operations, corporate development, venture capital, investment banking, or consulting, with a focus on compute infrastructure, semiconductors, or cloud platforms.

• Proven expertise in financial modeling, ROI/NPV analysis, and cost optimization for large-scale, capital-intensive projects.

• Experience evaluating custom silicon, compute hardware, or large-scale infrastructure investments.

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate cross-functionally with engineering, supply chain, and product teams to drive strategic decision-making.

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a history of influencing high-impact investment decisions.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, including experience engaging with executive leadership.

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.