Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Strategic Sourcing Lead role stands out in SaaS because it sits at the commercial control point between product delivery and external capability. In software businesses, professional services spend often expands alongside customer deployments, compliance needs, and specialized engineering support. The listing signals a company operating at significant scale, where procurement is not transactional but a lever for governance, risk management, and predictable execution across a large vendor landscape.
For a SaaS career, the lasting value is learning how operating discipline is built when demand from technical and business teams outpaces existing process. Category strategy, intake models, and supplier segmentation are portable skills across cloud and subscription companies, especially as they mature procurement tooling and standardize contracting. Close partnership with Finance, Legal, Security, and workforce functions also builds fluency in the constraints that shape how SaaS organizations buy services without creating operational drag.
This position fits professionals who prefer structured problem solving, stakeholder alignment, and making decisions with incomplete information. It will suit someone comfortable translating varied internal needs into repeatable frameworks, and who enjoys influencing senior partners through clear recommendations rather than owning a single functional silo.
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 Finance ensures the organization is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission.
The Strategic Sourcing & Procurement function plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to deliver impact across its most important flywheels — research, product development, technology infrastructure, and services — by ensuring the company can scale responsibly, securely, and with strong commercial discipline.
Our work sits at the intersection of innovation and execution. We partner closely with Research, Engineering, Product, Marketing, Finance, Legal, Security, and Workforce teams to translate rapidly evolving business needs into scalable, compliant, and economically sound external partnerships. As OpenAI continues to grow at pace, the ability to engage third-party expertise quickly — while maintaining consistency, governance, and long-term value — has become a strategic imperative.
About the Role
Professional Services is one of OpenAI’s largest and fastest-growing spend categories, encompassing hundreds of vendors and material spend across consulting, advisory, engineering services, research services, legal, compliance, and other specialized professional engagements.
We are hiring a Professional Services Strategic Category Lead to own and mature OpenAI’s end-to-end strategy for professional services partnerships. You will bring cohesion, discipline, and forward-looking category design to a highly fragmented supplier ecosystem. You will also partner closely with senior business leaders to define how OpenAI engages professional services firms — from intake and commercial models through governance, risk management, and long-term supplier strategy.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. 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 global Professional Services category strategy, including supplier segmentation, engagement models, and long-term roadmap.
Define and standardize frameworks for how professional services are sourced, contracted, and governed across the company.
Establish clear category guardrails to balance speed, flexibility, cost efficiency, and compliance.
Lead strategic relationships with OpenAI’s most critical professional services partners.
Rationalize a fragmented supplier base by identifying consolidation, tiering, and preferred-partner opportunities.
Partner with Finance to improve cost transparency, rate structures, volume leverage, and forecasting across the category.
Partner closely with Legal and Extended Workforce teams to mitigate co-employment and regulatory risks.
Ensure professional services engagements are structured and operated in line with internal policies and external compliance requirements.
Introduce clearer governance for scope control, renewals, expansions, and offboarding.
Act as the primary strategic interface between Procurement and senior stakeholders across Research, Engineering, G&A, and Operations.
Influence decision-making through clear executive-level communication, data-driven insights, and structured recommendations.
You might thrive in this role if you have:
10+ years of experience in strategic sourcing, category management, consulting, or commercial leadership roles in fast-scaling, ambiguous environments.
Experience managing categories with co-employment or workforce classification risk.
Demonstrated ownership of large, complex professional services or consulting categories.
Strong commercial acumen across rate structures, SOW-based services, and vendor operating models.
Experience partnering with senior Finance, Legal, and HR/Workforce stakeholders
Familiarity with procurement systems (e.g., Zip, Ironclad) at a portfolio and governance level.
Executive-ready written and verbal communication skills.
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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
