Director of Strategic Finance, Payments & Platform

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.

The Applications Technology Strategic Finance team specializes in managing the financial performance of our products, ensuring alignment between financial objectives and product strategy. We focus on revenue forecasting and analytics, pricing, and unit economics for our products.

About the Role

We are hiring a Director of Strategic Finance, Payments & Platform to serve as the primary finance partner to our Payments and Integrity organizations. This role will be critical in shaping our financial strategy and ensuring the scalability and profitability of our products.

You will partner closely across Product and Engineering to accelerate growth, optimize investment decisions, and own financial planning for the Payments and Integrity platform. Responsibilities include driving strategic decision-making, overseeing financial performance, leading quarterly planning, and balancing growth and driving cost efficiency as the platform scales.

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:

• Serve as the primary strategic finance partner for Payments and Integrity Product and Engineering Teams, with direct ownership of the payments and platform fees line item on the P&L, including forecasting, variance analysis, and margin impact as volumes scale.

• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Business Development to influence payments-related decisions, including checkout design, vendor selection, and commercial deal structures, with a focus on optimizing net revenue and contribution margin.

• Own the end-to-end economics of payments, including processing fees, network costs, chargebacks, refunds, and fraud losses, and translate these dynamics into clear product and pricing tradeoffs.

• Drive payments cost optimization initiatives, including vendor negotiations, routing strategy, regional expansion tradeoffs, and tooling investments.

• Lead quarterly and long-range planning for the payments cost base, ensuring payments economics scale sustainably alongside new monetization models, including emerging commerce and agent-initiated transactions.

• Support special projects to continuously improve, automate, and scale forecasting and reporting tools, processes, and methodologies

• Stay updated on market trends and competitive dynamics to refine financial strategies.

• Collaborate with Accounting and FP&A teams to evolve financial forecasting and reporting processes.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 12+ years of experience in investment banking, consulting, or buy-side investing coupled with operational experience at a fast-paced, scaling company.

• Experience owning budgets for major functional areas within an organization, and working with operators on day-to-day execution to hit targets.

• Experience building and reviewing highly complex models, specifically in payments.

• A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks in financials.

• The ability to distill complex financial data into actionable insights and effectively communicate with leadership.

• Attention to detail and a commitment to accuracy in financial reporting and analysis.

• Enthusiasm for technology and artificial intelligence.

• Experience with SQL or a willingness to learn.

This is a unique opportunity to influence the financial trajectory of cutting-edge AI products while working at the intersection of strategy, finance, and technology. If you’re passionate about driving growth and optimizing product performance, we’d love to hear from you!

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.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

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

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.