About the team
Hardware Procurement Operations enables OpenAI’s hardware and infrastructure businesses to execute supplier engagements and purchases at speed while maintaining financial discipline, clear ownership, and effective controls.
Our work spans procurement execution, process and systems enablement, and lifecycle governance—from initial requests and agreements through purchasing, payment, and closeout, with related asset and inventory governance. We build practical operating models, resolve cross-functional barriers, and improve the tools and processes that help teams scale.
About the role
You will own procurement execution for complex infrastructure deals, including land transactions, lease agreements, power purchase agreements, and fast-moving colocation and fiber engagements. Scope may expand to cloud service provider (CSP) engagements and sourcing activities as business needs evolve.
This senior individual contributor role combines hands-on lifecycle management with commercial judgment and building scalable operations. You will recognize gaps in proposed supplier engagements, work with business owners, sourcing, Legal, and Finance to improve them, and translate agreements into executable purchasing and payment plans. You will also build standard processes and automation that help teams move faster while reducing deal risk.
In this role, you will:
Drive assigned engagements from intake and agreement execution through purchasing, ongoing obligations, amendments, renewals, final payments, and closeout.
Assess commercial and operational readiness, identify gaps in scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and payment terms, and drive resolution with the appropriate partners.
Resolve commercial, financial, and operational dependencies, aligning owners on required reviews and approvals. Represent procurement operations in deal planning and senior stakeholder escalations, presenting clear recommendations on commercial readiness, risks, and execution tradeoffs while respecting each function’s decision authority.
Maintain accurate obligation and purchasing records; coordinate payment readiness, acceptance evidence, invoice exceptions, and reconciliation with business owners, Treasury, Accounting, and Accounts Payable.
Establish procurement operating standards and influence business, sourcing, Legal, and Finance partners to adopt practices that improve supplier engagement quality, accelerate execution, and reduce risk. Build the processes, templates, playbooks, and upstream review cycles that make those standards actionable.
Design, implement, and manage workflow automation and AI agents, partnering with technical teams where needed; own testing, adoption, monitoring, exception handling, and appropriate human review and approval controls.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have independently managed complex procurement engagements through post-signature execution and closeout, with experience in at least one infrastructure category such as land, leases, power, colocation, or fiber.
Can distinguish well-structured supplier engagements from those that create avoidable ambiguity or exposure, recommend practical improvements, and recognize when Legal or Accounting judgment is required.
Understand contractual obligations, payment structures, and procurement controls, and can translate them into clear execution plans.
Can independently prioritize time-sensitive engagements, navigate ambiguity, and resolve cross-functional dependencies, seeking guidance on complex or consequential decisions. Communicate risks and tradeoffs clearly and influence senior stakeholders without formal authority.
Have built repeatable processes in an ambiguous environment and use procurement, contract management, and ERP systems and operational data to improve execution.
Have delivered workflow automation or AI agent solutions with measurable results and can manage their reliability, exceptions, and controls.
Additional experience that would be useful:
Experience across multiple infrastructure categories, CSP commercial models, multi-entity purchasing, milestone payments, or escrow arrangements.
Zip, Oracle, Ironclad, or comparable platforms; workflow configuration, low-code tools, APIs, or scripting.
What success looks like:
Business, sourcing, Legal, and Finance partners adopt shared operating standards, templates, and early review cycles, improving engagement quality and contracting readiness.
Request-to-agreement execution and request-to-PO cycle times improve measurably, alongside fewer preventable delays, missed obligations, invoice exceptions, and financial or contractual exposures.
Engagements remain actively managed through final payment and closeout, with dependable visibility into obligations, risks, ownership, and payment readiness.
Automation and AI agents reduce manual effort and improve speed and accuracy while maintaining effective controls.
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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