Sourcing Manager - IT

About the Team

The Strategic Sourcing team at OpenAI partners across the business to build a scalable, efficient, and thoughtful procurement function. We work closely with Finance, Legal, Security, IT, and business stakeholders to enable smart purchasing decisions, improve vendor outcomes, and reduce operational risk as OpenAI continues to grow rapidly.

This role will sit at the intersection of procurement strategy, stakeholder partnership, and operational execution, with a primary focus on IT-related spend categories, vendors, and processes. The ideal candidate is excited to help build structure in a fast-moving environment and enjoys balancing pace with sound commercial judgment.

About the Role

The Sourcing Manager – IT will play a key role in scaling OpenAI’s procurement function by leading strategic sourcing initiatives across technology-related spend, including hardware, services, and other IT categories. This role partners closely with cross-functional stakeholders to understand business needs, drive vendor evaluations, lead negotiations, manage renewals and new purchases, and improve supplier performance, while balancing cost, speed, and risk. The ideal candidate brings strong sourcing and vendor management experience, sound commercial judgment, and the ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, high-growth environment, while also helping build the processes, tools, and frameworks needed to support OpenAI’s continued scale.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Leading sourcing, negotiation, and vendor management activities across IT categories and related spend areas

• Partnering with IT, Security, Legal, Finance, and business stakeholders to understand requirements and develop sourcing strategies

• Running competitive sourcing processes, including market scans, RFx support, vendor evaluations, and negotiation planning

• Negotiating commercial, business, and operational terms with suppliers to drive favorable outcomes

• Supporting contract renewals, expansions, new purchases, and supplier performance management

• Identifying opportunities to improve cost efficiency, reduce risk, and increase process consistency across IT procurement

• Helping build procurement playbooks, templates, category strategies, and reporting to support scale

• Ensuring appropriate alignment with internal review processes, including legal, security, privacy, and finance approvals

• Tracking pipeline, savings opportunities, contract milestones, and sourcing activity with strong operational rigor

We’re looking for someone with:

• 7-10 years of experience in strategic sourcing, procurement, vendor management, or category management, with meaningful experience supporting IT or technology spend

• Strong sourcing and negotiation skills across software, services, and technology-related agreements

• Experience partnering with cross-functional stakeholders in fast-paced environments

• Strong commercial judgment and the ability to balance speed, risk, and business needs

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills

• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail

• Comfort working through ambiguity and helping build new processes where needed

• Experience with procurement systems, contract workflows, and spend management tools is a plus

• Experience at a high-growth technology company is a plus

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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