Strategic Sourcing Leader, Professional Services

The posting, as OpenAI wrote it

About the Team

OpenAI Finance helps ensure the organisation is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission. The Strategic Sourcing & Procurement team helps OpenAI scale responsibly and at speed by choosing the right external partners, structuring strong commercial agreements and building resilient supplier relationships. We partner with teams across the company to turn rapidly evolving needs into practical, economically sound solutions.

Professional Services provides specialist expertise and capacity across OpenAI, spanning consulting and advisory, finance and accounting, legal, people-related services and managed services. Our sourcing team helps business leaders define the outcomes they need, select capable partners and establish clear commercial and delivery accountability.

About the Role

We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Leader to lead and develop the Professional Services sourcing team and set direction across its portfolio. This is a people-management role with accountability for team performance, commercial quality, stakeholder experience and sustained business outcomes. You will translate business priorities into category strategies, achievable delivery plans and clear decision authority, while developing the judgement and independence of experienced sourcing professionals.

You will oversee a broad portfolio, from strategic advisory relationships and enterprise programmes to a high volume of statements of work and renewals. You will remain hands-on in selected complex negotiations and critical decisions, while enabling the team to own and deliver its work. Working with senior leaders across Finance, Accounting, Legal, People, Extended Workforce and the business, you will create clarity from incomplete information, resolve competing priorities and adapt the team's approach as OpenAI grows.

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 and develop the team: set clear objectives and expectations, delegate with appropriate decision boundaries, provide regular feedback, review performance and address persistent gaps. Build development and coverage plans that strengthen capability and reduce reliance on individual experts.
• Set the Professional Services portfolio strategy and roadmap, connecting business objectives, demand, spend, supplier markets and risk. Guide category plans and decisions on where to compete, consolidate, retain specialist partners or change the service delivery model.
• Manage the team's pipeline and capacity across strategic negotiations, supplier governance and recurring SOWs. Allocate work by capability, complexity and risk; make resource constraints and dependencies visible; and agree priorities and recovery plans before commitments become unachievable.
• Personally lead selected critical negotiations and set standards for commercial quality acro

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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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