Strategic Sourcing Lead, Professional Services

About The Team

OpenAI Finance ensures the organization is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission.

The Procurement organization enables our mission by ensuring every dollar is spent responsibly, compliantly, and efficiently.

About The Role

We are hiring a Strategic Sourcing Lead, Professional Services to support day-to-day sourcing execution and operational excellence across the Professional Services category. Professional Services at OpenAI includes advisory, consulting, SOW-based delivery partners, and specialized service providers that support critical company flywheels across research, product, technology, and services. This category is high-velocity and often ambiguous by nature, requiring strong judgment, clean contracting, and disciplined governance to ensure speed, cost efficiency, and risk control.

This role is intentionally operational and analytically focused, designed to complement senior strategic leadership driving large, complex, and novel professional services engagements. You will own and execute early to mid-tier supplier engagements, manage sourcing workflows end-to-end, and ensure clean execution across procurement systems and stakeholder touchpoints.

You will be a critical force multiplier — ensuring that deals move quickly, spend is visible, risks are surfaced early, and tooling is used effectively to support scale.

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

• Lead end-to-end professional services sourcing including supplier selection and commercial negotiations; supporting onboarding, renewals, amendments, and scoped expansions in partnership with senior sourcing leadership.
• Draft, review, and operationalize SOWs, pricing exhibits, and commercial terms in coordination with Legal and Finance.
• Ensure supplier engagements align with category strategy, commercial guardrails, and internal policies.
• Operate procurement workflows with high rigor: manage intake, approvals, contract routing, and documentation hygiene across tools (e.g., Zip, Ironclad, Slack); track deal status, spend thresholds, and execution risks across a live portfolio.
• Drive reporting and insights for senior stakeholders: maintain audit-ready records and dashboards; analyze spend, rate structures, usage trends, deal velocity, and bottlenecks; surface improvements to standardize and streamline workflows and governance.
• Identify opportunities to standardize, streamline, or improve sourcing workflows and governance across the category.
• Partner with cross-functional teams (e.g., Finance, Legal, and Extended Workforce) to unblock deals and reduce co-employment risk.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You Have

• 10+ years of experience in strategic sourcing, procurement, operations, or vendor management in fast-scaling, ambiguous environments.
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple concurrent and various Professional Services supplier engagements with strong attention to detail (e.g. consulting, advisory, managed services, SOW-based delivery).
• Experience partnering with Extended Workforce teams on worker classification and co-employment risk boundaries.
• Familiarity with rate cards, milestone-based pricing, deliverables-based governance, and acceptance-based billing structures.
• High operational fluency with tools such as Zip (or equivalent intake tools), Ironclad (or CLM systems), and Slack.
• Strong analytical skills — comfortable working with spend data, rate structures, contract terms, and operational metrics.
• The ability to execute independently while partnering effectively with senior stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfort working alongside senior leadership on sensitive or high-impact initiatives.

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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Key skills/competency

• Strategic Sourcing
• Professional Services Management
• Commercial Negotiations
• Supplier Relationship Management
• Procurement Operations
• Contract Lifecycle Management
• Spend Analysis
• Risk Control & Compliance
• Cross-functional Collaboration
• Workflow Optimization