Strategic Finance, Research

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

Our Workloads team under Research focuses on maximizing the performance and efficiency of model inference, enabling OpenAI to develop and deploy frontier AI models at scale.

We are hiring a senior Strategic Finance business partner to work closely with our Workloads team to drive improvements in model serving efficiency and compute economics. You will partner directly with researchers and engineers to identify and prioritize high-impact optimization opportunities, establish frameworks to measure performance, and translate technical improvements into financial outcomes. This is a great role for folks who have an interest in how AI research intersects with compute.

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 with Inference researchers, Scaling, Product, and Data Science  teams to identify, evaluate, and prioritize optimization opportunities, weighing customer and economic trade-offs across model performance, latency, throughput, engagement, and compute cost.

• Drive cross-functional strategic initiatives to improve inference efficiency by establishing clear ownership, coordinating work across teams, and tracking execution progress.

• Establish key performance metrics, dashboards, and analytical frameworks to identify inference performance gaps and quantify the financial impact of improvements.

• Partner with Compute Finance and other Strategic Finance teams to incorporate expected inference efficiency improvements into long-term compute demand forecasts, capacity planning, investment decisions and financial projections.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• A technical academic background (e.g., computer science, engineering, or mathematics) or current experience partnering closely with research or engineering teams on technical problems.

• 8–10+ years of experience in management consulting, strategy & operations, strategic finance, or a related analytical role.

• Strong analytical and structured problem-solving skills, with a track record of turning ambiguous problems into actionable recommendations and measurable impact.

• Executive presence and communication skills to build credibility with researchers and engineers, align stakeholders, and explain technical and financial trade-offs. 

• An entrepreneurial mindset, with experience building processes and independently driving initiatives from idea through execution.

• Technical curiosity and enthusiasm for frontier AI and inference economics. 

• Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, cloud computing, or technical performance optimization is a plus, but not required.

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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