Procurement Project Management Office Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s Finance team is building scalable infrastructure that protects company resources while enabling bold, responsible growth. Procurement—spanning Strategic Sourcing, Purchasing, Extended Workforce, and Travel & Expense (T&E)—owns the full lifecycle from policy to tools to operations. We’re transforming how OpenAI works with the world by making it easier, safer, and faster to engage external partners. Our mission reduces friction, protects the business, and empowers every team to thrive.

About the Role

This role is part of the Procurement Center of Excellence (COE), where we build the systems, governance, and cross-functional programs that enable Procurement to scale effectively. You will serve as the strategic program manager for procurement-wide initiatives—tracking delivery across sourcing, purchasing, expense, card, and workforce programs while maintaining a centralized view of milestones, risks, and dependencies.

You’ll drive quarterly planning, enforce project hygiene, manage cross-functional coordination, and accelerate the delivery of high-impact operational initiatives. You will also own the performance, governance, and integration of outsourced Procurement services—including BPO partnerships and contingent workforce delivery. You’ll define engagement standards, monitor SLAs, and serve as the connective tissue between external providers and internal stakeholders to ensure service quality and accountability.

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:

• Run centralized program management for procurement-wide initiatives — spanning Strategic Sourcing, P2P, T&E, Corporate Card, and Extended Workforce.

• Manage outsourced procurement services (e.g., BPO providers, contingent workforce vendors) — including day-to-day performance tracking, SLA enforcement, and quarterly business reviews.

• Drive quarterly planning and delivery, identifying critical dependencies, execution risks, and resource needs across procurement verticals.

• Lead procurement governance rituals — including intake triage, weekly status reviews, leadership updates, and cross-functional escalations.

• Partner cross-functionally with Procurement Systems, Legal, and Accounting to implement operational changes (e.g., policy updates, tooling enhancements, automation workflows).

• Track program milestones and KPIs to assess performance, unblock execution, and communicate impact to stakeholders.

• Coordinate change enablement — including communications, documentation, training, and rollout plans to drive adoption of new policies or tools.

• Maintain centralized documentation and playbooks that support cross-functional procurement programs, vendor oversight, and COE best practices.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Believe great infrastructure accelerates great work — and take pride in building scaffolding that helps others move faster with clarity and control.

• See structure and governance not as constraints, but as tools for scalable decision-making and responsible growth.

• Approach vendors and BPO partners as extensions of the team — holding a high bar for service, performance, and shared accountability.

• Are deeply curious about how systems, metadata, and policy shape behavior — and love designing for integrity at scale.

• Communicate with precision and empathy — especially when priorities shift, risks emerge, or change needs a champion.

• Care about getting the details right — not for perfection’s sake, but because trust is earned in how we operationalize our values.

• Are excited to help build what next-gen procurement looks like at an AI company — not by chasing trends, but by inventing durable solutions from first principles.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of experience in procurement operations, program management, or business process transformation roles.

• Experience managing or governing outsourced Procurement services (e.g., BPO, shared service centers, contingent workforce providers).

• Proven ability to drive cross-functional execution across Legal, Systems, Finance, and operational teams in high-growth or high-complexity environments.

• Familiarity with procurement technology platforms (e.g., Zip, Coupa, Navan, Brex, NetSuite, Workato) and how policy maps into tools and metadata.

• Strong communication and documentation skills, with an ability to translate ambiguity into structure and process.

• Demonstrated experience owning change management, enablement, or rollout strategies across diverse stakeholder groups.

• A bias for structured execution, continuous improvement, and principled decision-making under pressure.

• Enthusiasm for building AI-powered workflows that reduce friction, increase compliance, and help teams move faster.

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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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