Strategic Finance, Hardware R&D Finance Manager

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

We are hiring a Hardware Finance Manager, R&D to own the financial strategy, investment modeling, and long-range planning for our hardware R&D programs. This role sits at the intersection of Hardware Engineering, Product, and Finance, and is responsible for ensuring that R&D roadmap decisions—spanning technical scope, sequencing, resourcing, and timelines—are grounded in rigorous financial analysis and disciplined capital allocation.

This role will serve as the embedded finance partner to Hardware Engineering and Product teams, with end-to-end ownership of R&D investment models, program-level financials, and long-range planning across the hardware development lifecycle. You will help leadership evaluate tradeoffs across technical ambition, speed, risk, and capital efficiency as hardware programs scale in scope and complexity.

We have a strong preference for candidates who can be based in our San Francisco HQ. 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 oversee multiple areas of responsibility:

• Own end-to-end hardware R&D financial models across the development lifecycle, from early concept and prototyping through development, validation, and transition to production.

• Serve as a key finance partner to Hardware Engineering and Product leadership, supporting decisions on roadmap sequencing, technical scope, resourcing levels, and investment pacing through clear financial frameworks and scenario analysis.

• Translate technical roadmaps into financially grounded R&D execution plans, integrating assumptions around headcount ramps, staffing mix, tooling, lab and test infrastructure, and development timelines.

• Drive capital discipline and investment efficiency, proactively identifying scope changes, resourcing inefficiencies, and investment risks before spend becomes structurally locked in.

• Own R&D forecasting, budgeting, and variance analysis, providing clear visibility into spend vs. plan, key drivers of change, and implications for broader hardware investment priorities.

• Frame program-level tradeoffs and decision scenarios for leadership, clearly quantifying implications across cost, schedule, technical risk, and long-term platform value.

• Build and maintain standardized R&D investment dashboards and program views to provide consistent, executive-ready visibility into burn rates, milestone progress, and capital allocation.

• Support portfolio-level decision-making by comparing investment profiles across hardware programs and generations, informing prioritization, sequencing, and long-term R&D strategy.

• Contribute to the development and scaling of the hardware R&D finance foundation, improving modeling rigor, governance, and decision support as the hardware portfolio grows.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 8+ years of progressive finance experience with significant exposure to hardware, manufacturing, or complex supply chain businesses.

• A passion for helping build world-class finance teams and driving business and financial outcomes, as measured on margin improvement, working capital efficiency, forecast accuracy, and execution of cost-reduction initiatives.

• A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks.

• Expert modeling skills with best-in-class attention to detail and unwavering commitment to accuracy.

• Exemplary ability to distill complex financial information into actionable insights.

• Excellent communication skills and “story telling” ability when presenting data insights.

• Strong enthusiasm for building the human-computer interface for the AI era.

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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