Business Operations, Transactions 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 Transactions Lead to support strategic transactions across corporate development, partnerships, and new commercial models. This role will flex across a range of needs — from leading deals such as acquihires and balance sheet investments, to providing analytical, operational, and strategic support on major partnerships and commercial transactions.

You’ll serve as a first point of contact for the COO in coordinating some of OpenAI’s most important and complex transactions — working directly on deals that span Fortune 500 companies, high-growth startups, and even national partners. It’s a unique opportunity to sit at the center of how OpenAI expands its reach, builds new business models, and forms partnerships that shape the global AI ecosystem.

The ideal candidate is a deal-minded operator — someone who has led transactions in venture capital, private equity, or corporate development, and is excited to apply that experience inside a fast-moving company. You’ll help evaluate opportunities, run deal processes, and shape how OpenAI builds and scales its transaction execution muscle.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We operate on a hybrid work model with three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance. Travel (up to 10%) may be needed to support key partnerships and high-impact initiatives.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and support transactions across the business, spanning corporate development, partnerships, investments, and new commercial models.

• Take ownership of select deal processes end-to-end, including sourcing, diligence, valuation, negotiation, and integration planning.

• Partner with cross-functional teams — legal, finance, product, partnerships, and engineering — to structure and execute complex transactions.

• Provide analytical, operational, and strategic support for major deals — from market analyses, financial modeling, and strategic rationale framing to defining product requirements and coordinating cross-functional execution.

• Build systems and processes that make transaction execution more repeatable and scalable over time, including structuring internal and board approval processes.

• Bring structure to ambiguous deal opportunities, helping the company prioritize what to pursue and why.

• Contribute to leadership discussions on long-term partnership, investment, and acquisition strategy.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in venture capital, private equity, investment banking, or corporate development, with direct deal execution experience.

• Have operated within a company or worked closely with operating teams and are excited to move from “deal-maker” to “operator.”

• Have a strong grasp of transaction dynamics — valuation, deal structuring, negotiation, and integration.

• Are highly analytical and comfortable building and interpreting complex financial models.

• Are a clear, persuasive communicator who can navigate cross-functional conversations with executives, legal, finance, and technical teams.

• Thrive in ambiguous environments, balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

• Are deeply curious about technology and AI, and how transformative technologies shape industries and capital flows.

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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