Strategic Sourcing Manager

About the Team

The Hardware Strategic Sourcing & Partnerships organization is responsible for the global supply of compute infrastructure powering OpenAI’s model training and inference. We lead strategy, supplier engagements, commercial architecture, execution, and long-term enablement across advanced systems including custom silicon, accelerators, CPU platforms, networking, memory, power delivery, cooling, and full rack solutions.

We are a small, high-impact team working across engineering, operations, finance, legal, and executive leadership to scale OpenAI’s fleet worldwide.

About the Role

We are seeking a Sr. Strategic Sourcing Manager to own and lead sourcing strategy and global supplier partnerships for the Memory Storage & CPUs category (e.g., power systems, high-speed interconnect, memory subsystems, networking modules, mechanical enclosures, thermal systems, etc.). You will be the single-threaded leader across supplier strategy, selection, negotiations, and commercial/operational execution.

You will be accountable for enabling massive growth, reducing long-term cost curves, securing supply resilience, and aligning supplier technology roadmaps with OpenAI’s future system architecture needs.

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.

Key Responsibilities

1. Own the category end-to-end: strategy, business case, supplier selection, executive alignment, and operational enablement

2. Lead complex commercial negotiations including MSAs, NRE, cost models, open-book pricing, ramp/capacity commitments, and risk-buy frameworks

3. Build and scale a reliable global supply base with redundancy and geopolitical compliance, including mapping and influencing sub-tier suppliers to ensure resilience across the extended supply chain.

4. Translate engineering requirements into actionable sourcing plans with tier-1 manufacturing partners

5. Drive cost benchmarking and teardown insights to shape long-term cost-down strategies

6. Maintain tight alignment with Operations, Capacity Planning, Finance, and Program Management to ensure supply readiness against growth milestones

7. Build executive-level relationships with suppliers to ensure priority allocation and roadmap synchronization

8. Define scalable sourcing processes and dashboards for risk, cost, and performance transparency

9. Mentor and uplift sourcing peers by role-modeling strong cross-functional leadership and commercial excellence

Qualifications

• 8+ years of strategic sourcing or supplier management experience in advanced electronics, cloud infrastructure, telecom, or semiconductor supply chains

• Demonstrated success owning a category and supplier portfolio at scale (supply assurance, commercial strategy, cost roadmap), including leading complex negotiations

• Strong understanding of electronic and module-level cost drivers (e.g., power, PCBAs, connectors, cooling, memory, networking)

• Proven ability to influence and partner with Engineering, Program Management, Legal, and Finance at senior levels

• Executive presence and ability to communicate clearly in high-stakes supplier and leadership forums

• Comfort with fast-paced ambiguity and decisive decision-making in compressed timelines

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in hyperscale datacenter supply chain environments

• Familiarity with export controls and high-risk country strategies

• Technical background in [mechanical/electrical engineering, high-speed IO, thermal systems, or rack-scale architecture]

• Experience building sourcing playbooks, processes, and scalable operational mechanisms

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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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