Strategic Finance, B2B Transactions Lead

About the Team

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

Within Strategic Finance, this team focuses on the financial performance of our B2B products and GTM functions, ensuring tight alignment between financial objectives and company strategy. We drive operational and financial planning, deliver actionable insights on B2B performance, and help optimize strategic resource allocation to accelerate growth. 

About the Role

We are hiring a senior leader in B2B Strategic Finance to work at the center of OpenAI’s most important and transformational deals that blend elements of corporate development, strategic partnerships, and large deal-pricing work. This is a highly visible role that reports into the Head of B2B Strategic Finance and supports some of our most critical executive stakeholders, including our COO, CFO, and Chief Commercial Officer.

You will partner closely with the Special Situations deal leads, COO staff, Product and Research leaders, Legal, and the broader Finance organization to:

• Bring rigor and structure to ambiguous, first-of-its-kind transactions.

• Build and own detailed financial models for complex, multi-year deals.

• Shape how OpenAI prices, structures, and approves transformational partnerships and commercial agreements.

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 Strategic Finance partner to the Special Situations B2B team, acting as the primary financial thought partner on transformational research, partnership, and commercial transactions.

• Lead the financial workstream for complex deals — owning valuation, unit economics, scenario modeling, downside protection analysis, and sensitivity testing across revenue, compute cost, and cash flows. 

• Design and evaluate bespoke commercial structures such as multi-year commitments, usage-based pricing, rev share, co-funded R&D, minimums, take-or-pay constructs, and combinations of commercial and strategic/equity components.

• Partner with Business Operations / Transactions Leads and deal owners to run end-to-end deal processes: shaping deal strategy, defining success metrics, supporting diligence, and ensuring clean hand-offs into execution and post-close tracking. 

• Drive internal alignment and approvals by translating complex deal structures into clear financial narratives and decision frameworks for executive leadership and the Board (e.g., investment cases, trade-offs, risk/return profiles, and portfolio-level implications). 

• Build and maintain robust financial models and templates that make it easier to evaluate future Special Situations opportunities in a consistent, scalable way (e.g., standardizing how we model compute, margin, and long-term value creation). 

• Develop and refine prioritization frameworks that help the company decide which high-effort opportunities to pursue, when to say no, and how to compare transactions against one another and against “core” growth paths.

• Partner with Accounting, Tax, and Legal to ensure deal structures align with revenue recognition, compliance, and risk management considerations.

• Create post-close performance tracking and reporting for Special Situations deals, including dashboards and readouts that help leadership understand whether deals are delivering the intended strategic and financial outcomes.

• Contribute to long-term partnership and transaction strategy, helping shape how Special Situations fits into our broader B2B and corporate development roadmap. 

• Help build the B2B Finance function itself, modeling high standards for analytical rigor, cross-functional partnership, and judgment in highly ambiguous environments.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 12+ years of progressive experience in Strategic Finance, Corporate Development, Investment Banking, Private Equity, Venture Capital, or Management Consulting, with significant direct deal execution experience. 

• A track record working on complex, bespoke transactions — such as large strategic partnerships, multi-year enterprise deals, or investment/partnership hybrids — ideally in a high-growth technology context. 

• Deep modeling and analytical skills, including comfort with multi-scenario P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet modeling, and the ability to incorporate technical / operational constraints into deal economics. 

• Strong understanding of deal dynamics and financial structuring — from valuation and pricing mechanics to risk-sharing, performance incentives, and integration considerations. 

• Demonstrated ability to bring structure to ambiguity: framing problems, breaking down complex opportunities, and guiding senior stakeholders through trade-offs and recommendations. 

• Exceptional communication and executive presence, with a proven ability to explain complex financial concepts to technical, non-technical, and executive audiences and to influence decisions with clear, concise narratives. 

• Experience collaborating closely with cross-functional partners (e.g., Legal, Product, Engineering, Partnerships, BizOps) on high-stakes, time-sensitive projects. 

• High comfort operating in a fast-paced, unstructured environment, with a “roll up your sleeves” mentality and bias toward action. 

• Deep curiosity about AI and its impact on enterprises, industries, and capital flows, and enthusiasm for helping define how frontier AI is adopted across the world.

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.

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