Compute Business Operations Lead

About the Team
OpenAI’s Industrial Compute team is responsible for securing and scaling the core resources that power our research and products. We partner across engineering, finance, legal, and operations to identify, negotiate, and execute strategic partnerships that expand OpenAI’s capacity for compute, power, and data center infrastructure. Our mandate spans energy procurement, real estate development, colocation, cloud service providers, and silicon vendors—ensuring OpenAI can grow with speed, resilience, and cost-efficiency.

About the Role
We’re hiring a Compute Business Operations Lead to drive high-priority, cross-functional initiatives that shape how OpenAI scales its compute infrastructure. This role blends strategic thinking and operational excellence: you’ll bring structure to ambiguous problems, coordinate across technical and business teams, and ensure our most critical compute priorities move forward with clarity and speed.

Rather than focusing on a single work stream, you’ll work across the breadth of the Compute organization. You’ll take ownership of complex, high-stakes projects that don’t fit neatly into existing functions, help shape strategy, and build the mechanisms that let us scale efficiently.

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:

• Take end-to-end ownership of critical compute initiatives that span multiple teams and functions.

• Shape and operationalize programs that support OpenAI’s infrastructure scale-up, turning one-off efforts into repeatable systems.

• Collaborate with internal technical, product, finance, and operations teams and external compute partners to align priorities and deliver results.

• Build clear frameworks, reporting, and communication channels that help leadership make informed decisions.

• Identify gaps in how we plan and execute across the compute lifecycle, and design solutions that endure as we scale.

• Serve as a trusted partner to leadership, helping scope, prioritize, and execute the most important cross-functional compute projects.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 7+ years of experience in strategy, business operations, private equity, management consulting, venture capital, or similar fields, with 2+ years spent operating inside a company.

• Excel at bringing clarity and structure to ambiguous problems and driving them to completion in fast-moving environments with multiple stakeholders and objectives

• Able to see around the corner for future challenges and eager to solve them with a high sense of ownership, initiative and agency

• Proficiency building systems and proficiency that scale long-term

• Communicate clearly with executives, engineers, and operators alike, adapting your approach to the audience.

• Are highly analytical and comfortable using data to inform decisions.

• Move fluidly between strategy and detail, balancing long-term vision with day-to-day execution.

• Build trust quickly, collaborate well across functions, and bring clarity to fast-moving environments.

• Are energized by OpenAI’s mission and the challenge of scaling world-class compute infrastructure.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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