Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Technical Business Development Manager role sits in the infrastructure layer that increasingly underpins modern SaaS and AI delivered as a service. Rather than focusing on application features, it addresses the capacity constraints that determine whether usage-based products can scale reliably, including power, data center footprint, cloud providers, and silicon supply. In the current SaaS ecosystem, these partnerships shape availability, unit economics, and resilience as directly as product roadmaps do.
For a SaaS career, the work builds durable leverage in how platform companies secure critical inputs and translate technical requirements into commercial agreements. It develops pattern recognition around vendor landscapes, long-horizon contracting, and cross-functional decision making with engineering, finance, legal, and operations. That combination is portable across SaaS businesses that depend on cloud infrastructure, marketplace partners, or regulated suppliers where supply and pricing dynamics affect growth plans.
The role tends to fit professionals who enjoy ambiguity and can move between technical detail and executive-level negotiation without losing rigor. It suits someone motivated by complex deal cycles, stakeholder alignment, and measurable outcomes, and who prefers building external partnerships that materially change what a SaaS product can deliver. Candidates who value systems thinking over feature delivery are likely to align well.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI’s Industrial Compute team is responsible for securing and scaling the core resources that power our research and products. We partner across engineering, finance, legal, and operations to identify, negotiate, and execute strategic partnerships that expand OpenAI’s capacity for compute, power, and data center infrastructure. Our mandate spans energy procurement, real estate development, colocation, cloud service providers, and silicon vendors—ensuring OpenAI can grow with speed, resilience, and cost-efficiency.
About the Role
We are looking for a Technical Business Development Manager focused on Infrastructure. In this role, you will source, structure, and negotiate high-value agreements across the critical pillars of OpenAI’s infrastructure stack. You will work directly with external partners and suppliers while collaborating internally with engineering, legal, finance, and operations to ensure we have the resources needed to support state-of-the-art AI systems. This role requires a blend of technical understanding, commercial acumen, and strategic execution.
This role will focus on building partnerships and executing deals in one or multiple areas below:
Energy / Power: securing scalable and sustainable energy supply
Land / Real Estate: identifying and negotiating for strategic sites
Colocation: evaluating and contracting for third-party data center capacity
CSP (Cloud Service Providers): structuring partnerships with hyperscalers and AI-focused clouds
Silicon: engaging semiconductor partners for advanced compute supply
Equipment: securing vital datacenter equipment from key vendors
In this role, you will:
Identify, evaluate, and execute strategic partnerships across energy, land, colocation, CSP, and silicon domains.
Lead negotiations for complex commercial agreements, balancing cost, speed, and long-term scalability.
Build and manage relationships with executives at utilities, real estate developers, colocation providers, CSPs, and semiconductor companies.
Develop market intelligence to inform OpenAI’s infrastructure roadmap and partnership strategy.
Coordinate across legal, finance, and engineering teams to structure agreements that align with technical and business objectives.
Represent OpenAI in external forums, conferences, and industry working groups to strengthen our ecosystem presence.
Track, measure, and report on the impact of business development initiatives.
You might thrive in this role if you:
8+ years of experience in business development, strategic partnerships, or corporate development, ideally in technology, energy, real estate, or infrastructure sectors.
Proven track record of closing complex, high-value commercial agreements.
Strong technical fluency in at least one of the following areas: energy markets, data center design, cloud infrastructure, or semiconductors.
Exceptional negotiation and relationship management skills with the ability to engage C-level stakeholders.
Analytical skills to assess market opportunities, model deal structures, and evaluate long-term ROI.
Comfort navigating ambiguity in a fast-moving environment.
MBA or equivalent experience is preferred but not required.
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.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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