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 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.

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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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

If you have questions, feedback, or input about this job posting, please reach out to [email protected].

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.