Strategic Deals & Commercial Architecture Lead

OpenAIs Finance and Revenue Operations organization builds the commercial infrastructure that enables the business to scale with speed discipline and financial integrity.

Deal Desk operates as the commercial strategy and governance function at the intersection of Sales Partnerships Legal Technical Revenue Finance Order Management Billing Operations Product and GTM Systems. We architect complex enterprise transactions turn ambiguity into executable decisions and create the guardrails that let the business move quickly with operational and financial discipline.

As OpenAIs enterprise business grows in scale and complexity Deal Desk defines how novel commercial motions become durable operating capabilities. We convert precedent-setting deal decisions into repeatable policy controls workflows and systems requirements.

We are hiring a Strategic Deals & Commercial Architecture Lead to lead the structuring and governance of OpenAIs most complex enterprise transactions.

This is a senior individual-contributor leadership role for someone with exceptional enterprise deal judgment operational rigor and a builder mindset. You will serve as the commercial architect for high-stakes opportunities translating ambiguous requirements into coherent deal structures approval strategies and executable quote-to-cash plans.

Your work will shape more than individual transactions. You will establish decision principles and precedent clarify tradeoffs and turn recurring patterns into scalable guidance controls systems requirements and enablement.

You will own the commercial decision and governance layer that helps strategic opportunities move decisively while managing downstream risk across contracting billing revenue recognition provisioning reporting controls auditability and customer experience.

The right candidate can move seamlessly between advising on a single high-value transaction and improving the operating model behind it. They develop a clear point of view recommend pragmatic paths forward and align senior cross-functional stakeholders without formal authority.

This role is based in San Francisco CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

• Serve as the senior Deal Desk authority and commercial architect for complex precedent-setting enterprise transactions shaping deal structure economics terms and approval strategy

• Lead cross-functional deal strategy and governance synthesizing input from Sales Legal Finance Product and operations to recommend clear executable paths forward

• Establish decision frameworks guardrails exception principles and escalation paths that accelerate sound commercial decisions and protect financial and operational integrity

• Translate novel commercial requirements into scalable quote-to-cash workflows and systems capabilities identifying recurring friction and driving automation and process improvement

• Assess the end-to-end implications of proposed deal structures across contracting billing revenue recognition provisioning reporting controls auditability and customer experience

• Convert deal precedent and recurring patterns into approval matrices operating policies playbooks and enablement that improve organizational leverage and consistency

• Typically 7 years of individual-contributor experience in Deal Desk commercial strategy commercial operations pricing and monetization or a related enterprise SaaS function

• Deep expertise structuring complex non-standard enterprise transactions and evaluating tradeoffs among customer value business velocity economics and risk

• Strong command of quote-to-cash processes and the downstream operational and financial impacts of contracting billing and revenue recognition decisions

• Exceptional judgment in ambiguity with the ability to form a point of view recommend a path forward and influence senior stakeholders without formal authority

• Hands-on experience with enterprise commercial systems such as Salesforce CPQ CLM billing and order-management platforms including translating commercial policy into scalable system requirements

• Experience with enterprise cloud business models and commercial constructs including usage-based committed-spend and hybrid pricing models.

• Experience supporting new products or monetization motions with complex contracting provisioning billing or accounting dependencies.

• Experience leading cross-functional policy operating-model or systems transformations that improved deal velocity decision quality or control effectiveness.

• View Deal Desk as a strategic commercial capability and enjoy developing a point of view on complex high-stakes decisions.

• Bring a builder mindset to creating scalable structures controls and repeatable execution mechanisms in a fast-evolving environment.

• Balance commercial urgency with disciplined execution protecting revenue integrity auditability and customer outcomes.

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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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