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. 

About the Role

As the Strategic Finance Lead on Infrastructure Software, you will partner with senior leaders across the company to marry our strategic plans on infrastructure software and services to OpenAI’s business and financial model. You will collaborate with technical program managers, product managers, compute platform team, and other business partners to create financial forecasts and tracking for these software and services, and help optimize efficient spending. You will also provide financial guidance and strategic support to management through budget versus actual analysis, ROI on Build vs. Buy analysis, and projects requested by our CFO and other leaders. You will need to have deep expertise in SaaS and an exacting attention to detail.

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:

• Partner across the business to provide financial rigor on software spend and forecast. 

• Provide a financial perspective and framework on Building Internally vs. Buying to ensure efficient capital allocation. 

• Establish cross-functional partnerships with technical leads aimed at identifying, understanding, and translating their infrastructure software needs to financial forecasts.

• Build detailed operating models for these software spend as we start to build frameworks to forecast different types of expenses.

• Partner with Accounting on month-end close to ensure we are delivering the correct financial reporting insights and disseminating these results to stakeholders to drive accountability.

• Build a culture around predictability by proactively identifying usage trends, incorporating them into our projections, reducing variances in reported results, and instilling the value of accurate spend management with your business partners.

 You might thrive in this role if you have: 

• 8+ years in FP&A or Strategic Finance at a high growth startup.

• Strong proficiency in financial modeling and analysis, including expertise with Excel, Google Sheets, SQL, and BI tools (e.g. Sundial, Tableau).

• Exemplary interpersonal skills to clearly articulate financial data to colleagues and stakeholders outside of finance.

• Experience with infrastructure software and systems (database providers, security vendors, IT-infra SW).

• Deep understanding of AI tech stack and the key inputs to its success.

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. 

OpenAI Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement

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.