Business Operations Lead

About the Team

The Business Operations team tackles high-priority initiatives that span across strategic projects, pricing, partnerships, revenue strategy, and major business and product priorities. Working closely with the COO and business leadership team, we play a pivotal role in advancing OpenAI's most important initiatives and ensuring the company operates with clarity and focus.

To thrive in this team, you need to be a proactive problem-solver who excels at bringing structure to ambiguous challenges. Our work demands strategic thinking, cross-functional collaboration, and precision in execution. Team members succeed when they are analytical, detail-oriented, skilled at balancing multiple priorities, and passionate about driving high-stakes projects forward to deliver meaningful results.

About the Role

We're hiring a Business Operations Lead to help drive some of OpenAI's most important strategic and operational initiatives. This role will partner closely with senior leaders to tackle high-impact problems that cut across product, go-to-market, partnerships, pricing, finance, and broader business strategy.

This role is designed to flex with company priorities - taking on the problems that matter most at a given moment and carrying them from early framing through execution. You'll help translate high-level ambitions into clear strategies, operating plans, and decisions, and ensure that complex, cross-functional efforts move forward with speed and clarity.

You'll work closely with leaders across the company to evaluate opportunities, clarify tradeoffs, and align teams around a coherent path forward. The work will span everything from shaping product and commercial strategy, to evaluating new markets or business models, to driving execution on company-wide initiatives.

Success in this role requires strong judgment and range. You should be comfortable zooming out to assess strategic direction and right-to-win, while also diving deep into the details - whether that's a product roadmap, a market or customer analysis, a financial model, or an operating plan. You'll help ensure that OpenAI's most ambitious efforts are not only technically excellent, but strategically sound, commercially viable, and executed effectively.

In this role, you will:

• Own and drive high-priority strategic and operational initiatives across the business, working closely with product, GTM, partnerships, finance, and leadership teams.

• Act as a force multiplier on critical initiatives by accelerating decision-making, driving clarity, and ensuring projects move from intent to outcomes.

• Partner with leaders to define strategy, operating plans, and success metrics for critical initiatives.

• Apply rigorous analysis to complex problems, using data and structured thinking to inform decisions - while staying focused on real-world impact over perfect answers.

• Drive alignment across teams by translating strategy into clear priorities, programs, and execution plans.

• Identify risks, gaps, and tradeoffs early, and work cross-functionally to resolve them.

• Communicate insights, progress, and recommendations clearly to executive stakeholders.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience across business operations, product, strategy, or similar roles.

• Are comfortable owning complex problems that span multiple functions and require strong judgment under uncertainty.

• Are a deeply analytical thinker, but a doer at heart - you use analysis to drive action, not just create slides.

• Can move fluidly between big-picture strategic framing and hands-on execution.

• Take pride in seeing work through to outcomes, not just recommendations.

• Have experience partnering with senior leaders and influencing decisions across teams.

• Excel in fast-moving environments where priorities evolve and clarity needs to be created.

• Are an excellent communicator who can build alignment and momentum across diverse stakeholders.

• Are deeply curious about AI, technology, and how new products and businesses scale.

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

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $284K - $315K