Strategic Finance Lead, Robotics Hardware

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 Senior Finance Leader to own the financial stewardship of OpenAI’s Robotics hardware portfolio, serving as the financial lead for one of the company’s most capital intensive and strategically critical bets. This role sits at the center of Robotics leadership and OpenAI Finance, acting as the financial owner and decision partner for Robotics Engineering, Research, Product, and Operations.

This role will serve as the financial authority for Robotics, with ownership of long-range planning, capital strategy, investment economics, and executive decision support across the full Robotics portfolio. You will set the financial frame for highly technical roadmaps, enabling leadership to make informed tradeoffs across speed, risk, capital intensity, and long-term platform value as Robotics moves from frontier R&D toward scaled deployment.

We have a strong preference for candidates who can be based in our San Francisco HQ.
We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Own the Robotics financial strategy, investment portfolio, and capital plan, serving as the single point of financial accountability for the entire Robotics organization.

• Lead Robotics multi-year capital and investment planning, spanning R&D, headcount, facilities, manufacturing, and infrastructure.

• Own Robotics portfolio modeling and scenario planning, framing tradeoffs that directly inform executive decisions on scale, sequencing, and capital deployment.

• Own Robotics R&D forecasting, budgeting, and variance management, providing clear visibility into spend vs. plan, key drivers of change, and implications for company-wide investment priorities.

• Translate Robotics technical and research roadmaps into financially grounded execution plans, including assumptions around staffing mix, development timelines, infrastructure needs, and supporting capital investments.

• Partner closely with cross-functional Finance teams—including Financial Consolidations, Accounting, and Real Estate—to ensure Robotics financials are accurately reflected in company-wide reporting, planning, and resource allocation processes.

• Define the financial path to commercialization for Robotics, including pricing, unit economics, adoption curves, and revenue ramps.

• Provide executive-ready financial insights and narratives, clearly articulating risks, options, and tradeoffs across cost, timeline, technical uncertainty, and long-term platform value.

• Design and own the financial operating model for Robotics as it scales from advanced R&D into a hardware and platform business.

• Support portfolio-level decision-making by enabling comparisons across Robotics programs and investment profiles, informing prioritization, sequencing, and staged investment decisions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Experience serving as the finance lead for a large, complex hardware or technology business with multi-year capital commitments.

• A track record of owning P&L-level decisions, investment portfolios, or large-scale capital planning.

• 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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