Director Technical Accounting

About The Team

OpenAI Finance is responsible for ensuring the organization is set up for success in pursuit of its mission. The Technical Accounting team plays a crucial role in helping OpenAI navigate complex, judgmental, and rapidly evolving accounting matters with rigor and clarity. We aim to bring both technical excellence and strong business partnership to some of the most novel accounting questions in the industry.

About The Role

OpenAI seeks a Director, Technical Accounting, Revenue & Strategic Partnerships to set the technical revenue accounting strategy for the company's largest, most complex, and highest-risk commercial arrangements. This leader will personally assess novel fact patterns, establish and defend the accounting position, and shape deal structures before execution across enterprise contracts, strategic partnerships, API and consumption-based offerings, credits and incentives, revenue share, multi-party arrangements, and emerging product monetization models.

This role will be the senior technical accounting partner to Revenue Accounting, Sales, Product, Legal, Tax, Strategic Finance, Business Development, Deal Desk, Billing, Financial Reporting, Internal Controls, and external auditors. The core mandate is technical judgment: independently synthesize the full contractual and economic substance, identify alternatives and second-order implications, resolve ambiguity under ASC 606 and related U.S. GAAP, and communicate a clear recommendation to executives and auditors. Operational know-how is essential to translate conclusions into billing, close, disclosures, systems, and controls, but process ownership is not the center of the role.

In This Role, You Will

• Partner closely with Revenue Accounting, Sales, Product, Legal, Tax, Strategic Finance, Business Development, Deal Desk, Billing, Financial Reporting, and external auditors.

• Identify non-standard revenue arrangements early and evaluate them under ASC 606.

• Advise on thoughtful deal structuring for complex revenue and partnership arrangements.

• Operationalize scalable processes and controls for non-standard revenue contracts and emerging monetization models.

• Ensure complex revenue arrangements are reflected appropriately in financial statements and disclosures.

• Support cross-functional teams as a technical accounting advisor on strategic partnerships, customer incentives, and new product monetization approaches.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You Have

• CPA, CA, or equivalent accounting qualification.

• 12+ years of progressive experience in technical revenue accounting, public accounting, accounting advisory, or accounting leadership roles in technology environments, with meaningful industry experience and a record of personally owning enterprise-significant judgments.

• Recognized expertise in ASC 606 and adjacent U.S. GAAP, with the ability to analyze enforceable rights, related agreements, actual operating practices, and economic substance across contract scope, distinct promises, SSP, variable consideration, modifications, material rights, principal vs. agent, customer payments, noncash consideration, and consumption-based revenue.

• Experience resolving the most complex technology arrangements, including multi-party customer, vendor, or collaboration structures; cloud, marketplace, reseller, licensing, and API models; committed spend, capacity, rollover, and overage terms; integrated implementation or customization; strategic incentives; and new product launches.

• Proven ability to influence senior leaders across Strategic Finance, Product, Legal, Tax, Sales, Business Development, Revenue Accounting, Billing, Financial Reporting, and Internal Controls before signature, including resolving disagreement without relying on formal authority.

• Ability to convert ambiguity into concise, quantified, audit-ready positions and translate those conclusions into practical requirements for contracting, billing, close, disclosures, systems, estimates, and controls.

• Strong public-company discipline, including SOX-ready evidence, significant-judgment documentation, SEC filing and disclosure support, auditor defense, and clear executive communication of alternatives, risk, and recommendation.

• Demonstrated ability to build scalable, Finance-wide reference mechanisms, including risk-tiered intake, pre-signature checkpoints, escalation criteria, memo and policy standards, exception governance, and AI- or data-enabled contract review.

• Strong people leadership, including setting direction for experienced ICs, maintaining a high technical bar, developing senior talent and successors, and creating an inclusive team that can execute with autonomy.

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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