Strategic Finance, Hardware R&D and Consolidations

About OpenAI

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world’s best scientists, engineers, and business professionals together under one organization to accomplish this.

We're building the most advanced AI models and platforms, making it easy for developers and customers to benefit from AI via our suite of products.

OpenAI is expanding into consumer hardware to explore new human-computer interaction experiences. . Success in hardware requires world-class financial stewardship across the entire product cost stack, from early design and sourcing decisions to scaled manufacturing and lifecycle cost optimization.

About the Team

The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support the organization's long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest impact outcomes.

About the Role

We are hiring a Lead, R&D / Expense Finance & Consolidations to build and own the financial foundation that enables OpenAI’s next phase of hardware development. This role sits at the intersection of Hardware Engineering, Research, Robotics, and Finance, and is responsible for ensuring that every major investment decision — from hiring velocity to program sequencing to capital deployment — is anchored in rigorous operating and financial discipline.

This person will serve as the primary finance partner to Engineering, Research, Robotics, and Io leadership, with full ownership of OpEx forecasting, headcount strategy, and consolidated P&L reporting across all hardware organizations. You will translate technical roadmaps into financially grounded execution plans and help leadership optimize for growth capacity, capital efficiency, and long-term platform sustainability.

In this role, you will:

• Own end-to-end R&D and hardware OpEx forecasting across Engineering, Research, Robotics, and Io, from annual planning through rolling monthly reforecasts.

• Own headcount planning, hiring capacity modeling, and workforce scenario planning across all technical organizations.

• Serve as the embedded finance partner to technical leadership, guiding investment prioritization, hiring pacing, and program sequencing decisions.

• Translate technical and hardware roadmaps into financially grounded operating plans, integrating spend, hiring, infrastructure, and runway assumptions.

• Lead integrated P&L reporting and financial consolidation across Io and all hardware organizations.

• Build a single, auditable source of truth for leadership across cost centers, programs, and legal entities.

• Ensure consistent allocation methodology, intercompany treatment, capitalization policy, and cost attribution in partnership with Accounting.

• Establish and run the monthly and quarterly financial operating cadence, including:

  • Forecast vs. actuals

  • Headcount vs. plan

  • Discretionary spend controls

  • Run-rate, burn, and runway monitoring

• Introduce program-level cost tracking and investment visibility across major R&D, Robotics, and Hardware initiatives.

• Proactively surface capital intensity risks, hiring velocity mismatches, and cost-to-output inefficiencies.

• Partner with executive leadership to drive capital discipline, ROI frameworks, and active reallocation decisions across major technical bets.

• Deliver leadership- and board-ready consolidated reporting to support strategic planning, funding decisions, and long-range investment strategy.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 12+ years of progressive finance experience with significant exposure to hardware, manufacturing, or complex supply chain businesses

• A passion for helping build world-class finance teams and driving business and financial outcomes, as measured on margin improvement, working capital efficiency, forecast accuracy, and execution of cost-reduction initiatives

• A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks

• Expert modeling skills with best-in-class attention to detail and unwavering commitment to accuracy

• Exemplary ability to distill complex financial information into actionable insights

• Excellent communication skills and “story telling” ability when presenting data insights

• Strong enthusiasm for building the human-computer interface for the AI era.

• A track record of building and leading high-performing teams.

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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