Head of Data Science - Strategic Finance

About the team

Strategic Finance Data Science helps OpenAI make consequential financial and operating decisions as the business grows. We connect customer behavior, product economics and business performance to the choices leaders make about goals, customer acquisition and investment.

The team works closely with Strategic Finance and partners across Data Science, Product, GTM and Data Engineering. Its work combines forecasting, analytical decision support and tools that make financial planning more effective.

About the role

We are seeking a data science leader who can turn complex, uncertain business questions into clear recommendations. You will lead an established team, strengthen its technical and leadership capabilities, and help shape where it can have the greatest impact.

You will partner with Finance and business leaders on forecasts, customer lifetime value, acquisition economics and resource allocation. This role calls for someone who can challenge assumptions, explain tradeoffs and follow the analysis through to a decision. You should be motivated by the opportunity to build a durable function during a period of rapid growth.

The role is based in San Francisco with three in-office days each week. Relocation assistance is available.

In this role, you will

• Build forecasting approaches that help leaders understand business trajectories, compare scenarios and make choices under uncertainty.

• Develop customer lifetime value and acquisition-economics models that inform marketing investment and balance near-term performance with long-term value.

• Partner with Strategic Finance on annual goals, budget decisions and resource allocation, including the economics of compute investment.

• Translate model outputs into clear operating recommendations, making assumptions, uncertainty and implications understandable to executive stakeholders.

• Strengthen the tools, metrics and recurring analyses that allow Finance partners to make decisions effectively and at scale.

• Recruit, coach and develop a high-performing team; establish priorities and accountability across ongoing work and urgent business questions.

• Work across consumer and business products, applying expertise in one business model while learning the dynamics of the other.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have partnered closely with a CFO, Finance leadership or a COO whose remit includes major financial and operating decisions. Your work has informed meaningful business choices, regardless of whether your title included Finance.

• Have led data science work in a large technology business or a rapidly scaling company, with experience adapting methods and priorities as the business changes.

• Bring deep forecasting judgment and can connect technical choices to business consequences, communicate limitations and respond constructively when a forecast misses.

• Have built strong teams, developed talent and attracted excellent colleagues. You can set direction while staying close enough to the work to challenge its quality.

• Communicate clearly with technical and business audiences and build trust through sound judgment, evidence and follow-through.

• Are excited by OpenAI’s mission and this specific opportunity to improve financial decisions in an evolving environment.

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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