Strategic Finance Lead, B2B Strategy & Planning

Job description

About the Team The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support OpenAI’s long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest-impact outcomes.  Within Strategic Finance, the B2B team focuses on the financial performance of our products and GTM functions, ensuring tight alignment between financial objectives and company strategy. We partner with leaders across Product, GTM, Research, Partnerships, and Operations to: - Drive operational planning, financial forecasting, and performance management. - Provide decision-quality insights on product and financial performance to inform strategic resource allocation. - Build the “0→1” financial foundations required to scale and accelerate growth. About the Role We are hiring a senior leader in B2B Strategic Finance to build and scale a new pillar within our finance organization. This is a highly visible role that reports into the Head of B2B Strategic Finance and supports some of our most critical executive stakeholders, including our COO, CFO, and CRO, among others on the B2B Leadership Team. This role is ideally based in our San Francisco HQ, but we are open to NYC and Seattle. 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: Drive B2B finance scale and rigor - Build and scale core financial infrastructure across the B2B business, including forecasting methodology, variance management, and performance narratives that drive accountability and decision-making velocity. - Lead consolidated planning across revenue, gross margin (including compute), and opex for annual budget, forecasts, regular business reviews, and long-range planning. - Establish durable management reporting: KPI definitions, dashboards, month-end/quarter-end deliverables, and exec-ready readouts. - Partner with Corporate FP&A, Accounting, and Finance Systems/Data to evolve processes and controls toward public-company standards. Be a strategic partner to B2B leadership - Lead forecasting and business reviews across usage, revenue, and gross margin, including scenario modeling tied to product & engineering constraints and compute economics. - Holistically manage the financial performance and unit economics of our B2B products. - Partner with Compute and Engineering on margin optimization and quantifying trade-offs across product experience, cost, and scalability. Stand up emerging high-stakes, strategic initiatives - Support high-priority strategic projects from 0 →1, partnering closely with leadership and adjacent B2B finance teams to stand up the initial financial frameworks, decision support, and performance tracking. - Translate complex problems into clear executive narratives (trade-offs, risk/return, and strategic recommendations). - Transition emerging initiatives to long-term owners as they scale. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 12+ years of progressive experience in Strategic Finance, Product Finance, Corporate FP&A, Corporate Development, Investment Banking/PE/VC, or Management Consulting—plus meaningful operating experience in a fast-scaling technology company. - Deep familiarity with B2B subscription and consumption / usage-based business models and the ability to reason fluently about unit economics and margin drivers (including compute-driven COGS). - Expert modeling and analytical skills (multi-scenario P&L and cash flow modeling, sensitivity analysis, and strong financial judgment). - A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks in financials; attention to detail and accuracy in financial reporting, budgeting, and analysis. - Demonstrated ability to bring structure to ambiguity, lead senior stakeholders through trade-offs, and drive crisp decisions in high-uncertainty environments. - Exceptional communication and executive presence—strong at building Board/exec-ready narratives from complex, cross-functional inputs. - A “roll up your sleeves” mindset, high ownership, and deep curiosity about AI and how it will reshape enterprises, industries, and institutions. - Experience with SQL or a willingness to learn. - A passion for helping build world-class finance teams and driving business and financial outcomes. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf 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.