Business Lead, Special Situations

Slope; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Business Lead in San Francisco to own a strategically important partnership. You will be the day-to-day driver, setting direction, building operating cadence, and delivering measurable outcomes across internal and partner teams.

This is a hands-on leadership role: you will develop plans, drive negotiations, craft decision materials, and execute joint go-to-market motions with enterprise customers. Strong product judgment and cross-functional influence are essential.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience leading high-stakes business operations, strategic partnerships, product operations, or complex cross-functional programs.
• A track record as the accountable operator for consequential outcomes, not only as an advisor or coordinator.
• Excellent program leadership and organizational skills, with a bias toward simple mechanisms that improve decisions and execution.
• Exceptional internal and external relationship leadership, including candid communication, conflict resolution, and expectation management.
• Strong product judgment and sufficient technical fluency to become deeply familiar with product stacks and integration theses.
• Commercial judgment and negotiation experience across economics, packaging, delivery commitments, and long-term strategic value.
• High agency, low ego, sound judgment, and willingness to do the detailed work.
• Clear, concise executive communication and exceptional follow-through in fast-moving environments.

Responsibilities

• Own the integrated partnership strategy and operating plan with clear priorities, outcomes, owners, dependencies, and decision points.
• Drive the highest-priority initiatives from problem definition through decision, implementation, and measurable outcomes.
• Build and run a rigorous internal and external operating cadence for decision velocity and risk visibility.
• Develop trusted relationships across executive, commercial, product, technical, legal, finance, and deployment stakeholders.
• Translate partnership priorities into commercial, product, technical, deployment, and go-to-market workstreams.
• Stand up a joint go-to-market motion and drive the first cohort of joint customers from targeting to execution.
• Form an opinionated view on integration, and translate it into roadmap choices with Product, Engineering, and deployment teams.
• Prepare executive decisions and escalate only material commitments that require sponsor approval.
• Deliver the required work through analysis, writing, negotiation prep, reviews, escalation, and follow-through.

Skills

Senior leadership

Partnership operations

Program management

Executive communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Product judgment

Negotiation

Risk management

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's Business organization works with customers and partners on some of our most complex and consequential opportunities. These efforts often span commercial strategy, product and technical collaboration, deployment, and new go-to-market motions.

About the Role

We are hiring a Business Lead to own and advance a strategically important partnership. This person will be the day-to-day DRI and operating leader: setting direction, building the operating cadence, driving decisions, and converting shared ambition into measurable results.

This is a hands-on leadership role, not a coordination role. You will personally develop plans and commercial positions, drive negotiations, write decision materials, resolve blockers, and drive execution across internal and external teams. You will become deeply familiar with both product stacks and develop a clear, defensible point of view on how our products should integrate with, complement, or remain distinct from the partner's products.

Success means operationalizing the partnership, standing up a joint go-to-market motion and landing an initial cohort of customers, and executing a high-quality enterprise deployment while expanding the depth and value of the relationship. This role is based in San Francisco.

In this role, you will:

• Own the integrated partnership strategy and operating plan, with clear priorities, outcomes, owners, dependencies, and decision points
• Personally drive the highest-priority initiatives from problem definition through decision, implementation, and measurable outcome
• Build and run a rigorous internal and external operating cadence that creates decision velocity, accountability, and early visibility into risk
• Develop trusted, high-accountability relationships across executive, commercial, product, technical, legal, finance, and deployment stakeholders
• Translate partnership priorities into well-formed commercial, product, technical, deployment, and go-to-market workstreams
• Stand up a joint go-to-market motion and drive the first cohort of joint customers from targeting and value proposition through execution
• Develop an opinionated view, grounded in customer value and technical feasibility, of how our products should integrate with, complement, or remain distinct from the partner's products; translate it with Product, Engineering, and deployment teams into roadmap choices, requirements, and implementation patterns
• Prepare executive decisions and escape only material strategy, economic, contractual, or external commitments that require sponsor approval
• Step into the work required to deliver the outcome, including analysis, writing, negotiation preparation, operating reviews, escalation, and follow-through

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Substantial experience leading high-stakes business operations, strategic partnerships, product operations, or complex cross-functional programs
• A track record as the accountable operator for consequential outcomes, not only as an advisor or coordinator
• Excellent program leadership and organizational skills, with a bias toward simple mechanisms that improve decisions and execution
• Exceptional internal and external relationship leadership, including candid communication, conflict resolution, and expectation management
• Strong product judgment and sufficient technical fluency to become deeply familiar with both product stacks, form a defensible integration thesis, challenge assumptions, and collaborate credibly with technical counterparts
• Commercial judgment and negotiation experience across economics, packaging, delivery commitments, and long-term strategic value
• High agency, low ego, sound judgment, and a willingness to do the detailed work required to move outcomes forward
• Clear, concise executive communication and exceptional follow-through in fast-moving environments with incomplete information

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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