Strategic Finance Lead — AI Inference & Compute

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Hybrid work model

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a senior Strategic Finance business partner to work with the Workloads team in Research, driving improvements in model serving efficiency and compute economics. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to identify opportunities, define measurement frameworks, and translate technical improvements into financial impact.

The role is based in San Francisco, CA with a hybrid work model (3 days in the office) and relocation assistance for new employees.

Qualifications

• Technical background in CS, engineering, or mathematics.
• 8-10+ years in management consulting, strategy & operations, strategic finance, or related analytical role.
• Strong analytical and structured problem solving with measurable impact.
• Executive presence to align researchers and engineers and explain trade offs.
• Entrepreneurial mindset with experience building processes and driving initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Inference researchers, Scaling, Product, and Data Science teams to identify, evaluate, and prioritize optimization opportunities, weighing customer and economic trade-offs across model performance, latency, throughput, engagement, and compute cost.
• Drive cross-functional strategic initiatives to improve inference efficiency by establishing clear ownership, coordinating work across teams, and tracking execution progress.
• Establish key performance metrics, dashboards, and analytical frameworks to identify inference performance gaps and quantify the financial impact of improvements.
• Partner with Compute Finance and other Strategic Finance teams to incorporate expected inference efficiency improvements into long‑term compute demand forecasts, capacity planning, investment decisions and financial projections.

Skills

Technical background

Cross-functional collaboration

Financial modeling

AI compute economics

Strategic mindset

Education

Technical degree in CS/engineering/math

Tools

SQL

Excel

Dashboards (Tableau/Looker)

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a senior Strategic Finance business partner to work with the Workloads team in Research, driving improvements in model serving efficiency and compute economics. You will collaborate with researchers and engineers to identify opportunities, define measurement frameworks, and translate technical improvements into financial impact.

The role is based in San Francisco, CA with a hybrid work model (3 days in the office) and relocation assistance for new employees.