Corporate Development, Strategy & Scouting Lead

About the Team

The Corporate Development team sits at the intersection of OpenAI’s strategy and the global AI ecosystem. Partnering closely with engineering, product, and business leaders, we analyze markets, technologies, and companies to identify opportunities that accelerate OpenAI’s mission and long-term strategy. Bringing together expertise in strategy, M&A, and integration, the team leads the end-to-end process of sourcing, evaluating, negotiating, and integrating acquisitions and other strategic transactions.

About the Role

The Strategy & Scouting Lead will be responsible for translating OpenAI’s strategy into the most compelling inorganic opportunities. You will have a constant pulse on AI trends, investment themes, and the startup landscape, and proactively surface the highest-impact companies and technologies. You will serve as a strategic thought partner, helping shape OpenAI’s direction through high-conviction, inorganic ideas that accelerate our efforts. Together with Corporate Development colleagues, you will evaluate opportunities, lead diligence and valuation, and transaction execution.

In this role, you will:

• Track and interpret key trends across AI, technology, and adjacent industries, translating the competitive and startup landscape into clear, high-impact insights for OpenAI’s leadership.

• Proactively source acquisition, strategic investment, and other opportunities by building deep relationships across the venture, startup, and incubator ecosystem.

• Partner closely with internal leaders to understand OpenAI’s priorities and use external market intelligence to help shape strategy and identify where inorganic moves can accelerate it.

• Work on transactions, including opportunity framing, market and company diligence, financial analysis, and deal structuring.

• Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, GTM, Legal, Finance, and Executive Leadership to evaluate opportunities and drive them through to completion.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 10-12+ years of experience across strategy/consulting, venture capital, investment banking, corporate development, and/or product — and know how to turn insight into action.

• A genuine passion for AI and its impact on the world.

• Deep experience analyzing emerging technologies and markets, and enjoy working directly with founders, investors, and operators.

• Strong strategic judgment and analytical rigor to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving situations.

• Demonstrated comfort in operating with high ownership, building new processes where none exist, and driving work forward without clear precedent.

• Clear and persuasive communication and can interface with both senior internal stakeholders and external partners.

• The excitement to help build and shape OpenAI’s corporate development function at a mission-driven, category-defining company.

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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