Strategic Operations, Industrial Compute

Job description

About the Team Industrial Compute is building the infrastructure ecosystem that enables OpenAI to train and deploy increasingly capable AI systems at unprecedented scale. The organization operates across compute supply, demand, infrastructure, partnerships, and the physical and commercial systems required to make large-scale compute available. Industrial Compute Strategy & Operations serves as the connective operating layer across this ecosystem. The team works directly with senior leadership across Scaling, Finance, Partnerships, Research, and Infrastructure to translate ambiguous, high-impact challenges into clear strategies, scalable operating mechanisms, and decisive execution. This team is responsible for ensuring that OpenAI’s compute strategy evolves into durable competitive advantage by identifying systemic constraints, aligning stakeholders around critical decisions, and driving the operating mechanisms required to execute at scale. About the Role We are seeking a highly experienced Strategic Operations leader to help shape and operationalize OpenAI’s compute strategy across supply, demand, infrastructure, partnerships, and commercial strategy. This is a senior individual contributor role operating at the intersection of strategy, operations, infrastructure, and executive decision-making. You will work closely with compute leadership to identify the most consequential problems facing the organization, develop structured approaches to solving them, align stakeholders across the company, and drive initiatives from ambiguous concepts through execution. The role will span both strategic and operational work. You may develop long-range compute strategies and investment frameworks, evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, shape major commercial transactions, establish organizational planning mechanisms, or take ownership of a cross-functional initiative that does not have a clear organizational home. Success in this role requires exceptional judgment, analytical rigor, executive communication, and the ability to operate effectively in highly ambiguous environments. You will be expected to independently identify what matters most, build alignment across organizations, and create the operating systems that allow Industrial Compute to move faster and make better decisions. Key Responsibilities: Shape and Drive Compute Strategy - Partner with compute leadership to define and operationalize OpenAI’s long-term compute strategy across infrastructure providers, cloud partners, suppliers, and internal organizations. - Synthesize compute requirements, supply constraints, demand forecasts, and strategic priorities to inform long-range planning and investment decisions. - Develop strategic perspectives across GPUs, CPUs, storage, networking, WAN, power, land, supply chain, and other critical infrastructure dependencies. - Evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, strategic investments, corporate development opportunities, and emerging infrastructure business models. - Develop frameworks that help leadership assess compute availability, supply risk, investment tradeoffs, and long-term strategic positioning. - Identify emerging constraints and opportunities across the compute ecosystem before they become material business or infrastructure risks. Build the Operating System for Industrial Compute - Design and operate the cross-functional planning mechanisms that connect compute supply, demand, infrastructure, partnerships, and executive decision-making. - Establish leadership operating rhythms including strategic reviews, planning cadences, initiative tracking, and executive communications. - Develop metrics, KPIs, and analytical frameworks that give leadership clear visibility into compute performance, organizational health, and emerging constraints. - Create scalable mechanisms for tracking critical initiatives, dependencies, decisions, risks, and commitments across a complex organization. - Establish governance and decision-making frameworks that improve organizational clarity, accountability, and execution speed. - Develop systems that enable Industrial Compute to operate as an integrated organization rather than as a collection of independent functions. Drive Cross-Functional Strategic Execution - Lead high-priority initiatives that span multiple organizations, functions, or infrastructure domains and require a high degree of independent judgment. - Translate loosely defined leadership priorities into structured problem statements, strategic options, execution plans, and measurable outcomes. - Establish alignment across stakeholders with different objectives, incentives, and areas of expertise. - Identify organizational bottlenecks, unresolved dependencies, and gaps in ownership, then drive them toward resolution. - Work through complex technical, financial, commercial, and operational tradeoffs to enable timely executive decisions. - Take ownership of critical initiatives that lack clear organizational homes and drive them through completion. Strategic Partnerships & Commercial Strategy - Partner closely with the Partnerships organization to shape and execute complex strategic compute transactions. - Define the strategic rationale, business requirements, and success criteria for major compute partnerships and investments. - Align internal stakeholders across Finance, Partnerships, Research, Infrastructure, and Scaling around major commercial decisions. - Develop organizational capabilities around cloud commercial strategy, pricing optimization, capacity commitments, and vendor economics. - Analyze commercial structures, supplier relationships, and infrastructure partnerships to identify opportunities to improve cost, flexibility, availability, and strategic leverage. - Serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership on major compute partnerships, commercial decisions, and strategic infrastructure investments. Executive & Organizational Leadership - Operate as an extension of compute leadership on high-priority strategic and operational matters. - Bring structure and clarity to ambiguous problems and provide leadership with concise, decision-oriented analysis and recommendations. - Build credibility with senior leaders and technical experts through strong judgment, analytical depth, and a deep understanding of the compute ecosystem. - Influence decisions across organizations without relying on formal authority. - Anticipate organizational and infrastructure risks and proactively develop strategies to address them. - Build durable operating mechanisms that continue to create value beyond individual initiatives. Qualifications - Significant experience in strategy, strategic operations, business operations, management consulting, corporate development, infrastructure strategy, or a similarly high-impact strategic function, ideally within technology or infrastructure-intensive organizations. - Experience operating as a senior individual contributor on complex, company-level initiatives with significant ambiguity, executive visibility, and cross-functional dependencies. - Strong understanding of cloud, compute infrastructure, data centers, AI infrastructure, or other large-scale technology ecosystems and the commercial dynamics that shape them. - Demonstrated ability to develop long-range strategies that connect market dynamics, technical constraints, financial considerations, and organizational capabilities. - Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to turn complex and incomplete information into clear recommendations and decisions. - Strong commercial judgment and experience evaluating partnerships, vendor relationships, pricing structures, capacity commitments, investments, or other strategic transactions. - Experience building operating mechanisms, planning frameworks, metrics systems, and executive-level business reviews for complex organizations. - Demonstrated ability to drive initiatives across organizational boundaries, including situations where ownership is ambiguous and stakeholders have competing priorities. - Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to synthesize complex technical and business topics into clear narratives and decision points. - High degree of autonomy, sound judgment, and comfort making progress without established processes or complete information. - Ability to move fluidly between strategic thinking and detailed execution, from defining a multi-year strategy to driving the operational mechanisms required to deliver it. - Strong stakeholder management and influence skills, with the ability to build alignment among senior leaders, technical teams, finance, partnerships, and external organizations. - Experience working in fast-growing or highly dynamic environments where priorities, organizational structures, and business requirements evolve rapidly. 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. 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