Procurement Center of Excellence Leader

About the Team

OpenAI’s Finance team is building scalable infrastructure that protects company resources while enabling bold, responsible growth. Procurement—spanning 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

You’ll lead our approach to governance—defining global procurement standards, overseeing GL and vendor taxonomy, and building the compliance signals that surface risk before it hits. You’ll partner closely with Procurement Leaders, Systems, Finance, and Engineering to embed those standards into tools and workflows. And you’ll take an AI-first approach to policy design—using GPTs, automation, and smart nudges to drive behavior change at scale.

This is an AI-first role: You won’t just write policies—you’ll operationalize them through intelligent workflows, self-serve guidance, and GPT-powered prompts. You’ll govern the metadata (GLs, vendor types, spend classifications) that enable automation and financial integrity. You’ll turn messy data into clean insights that tell a story—and use that story to shift behavior.

Done right, this role makes it radically easier—and safer—for teams to engage the world at OpenAI speed.

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:

• Define and maintain global procurement policies across P2P, T&E, and Extended Workforce — aligning with audit, risk, and compliance requirements.

• Govern core metadata structures (e.g., GL schema, vendor taxonomy, spend categories) to enable accurate coding, reporting, and automation.

• Build dashboards and real-time insights that track policy adherence, flag risk signals (e.g., ATF, PR rejections), and highlight process friction.

• Partner with Engineering, Finance, and Procurement Systems to embed standards into tooling — including GPT-powered prompts, compliance nudges, and auto-coding logic.

• Operationalize policy through automation—designing workflows that guide requesters and approvers to the right outcomes with minimal friction.

• Lead enablement and training efforts for business users, finance partners, and procurement stakeholders — using data to target behavior change.

• Maintain the single source of truth for procurement standards, operational roles, and compliance expectations across the org.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• You combine rigorous thinking and practical execution—and care deeply about helping teams move faster, with more clarity and control.

• You love a clean schema, a smart automation, or a policy that just works without explanation.

• You’re energized by systems, metadata, and real-world workflows, not just theoretical best practices.

• You believe policy is only as good as the behavior it drives—and you know how to design for that.

• You hold the line when it matters—on risk, integrity, or GL hygiene—but do so with clarity and context.

• You’re excited by the idea of building next-gen procurement with AI—and not just talking about it.

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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