Strategic Finance Lead

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 Product 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 Strategic Finance Lead to help drive strategic decision making across our product org. You will play a critical role in shaping our financial strategy and ensuring the scalability and profitability of our products. You will also manage a small team, providing mentorship and leadership while remaining hands-on with analysis and execution.

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:

• Support strategic initiatives, including pricing, packaging, and business development deal structuring to enhance product profitability.

• Deep dive into frameworks and process improvements to increase our sophistication in analyzing, forecasting, and optimizing product contribution margins in real-time.

• Establish and manage key metrics underpinning product revenue and gross margin performance, and regularly monitor, analyze, and report on these metrics to drive continuous improvement and operational excellence.

• Drive cost optimization initiatives in collaboration with our compute, engineering, and product teams.

• Lead and mentor a small team of high-performing finance professionals while staying closely involved in analytical work and strategic initiatives.

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

• Create high-quality executive and Board-facing presentations.

• 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.

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

• Expert modeling skills, including building detailed product P&Ls and operating models.

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

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to craft compelling narratives using data.

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

• Comfort operating in a player-coach capacity—providing mentorship and direction while remaining deeply involved in analytical work.

• Familiarity with business models and metrics relevant to OpenAI, including contribution margin 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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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

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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.