Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Strategic Deals role sits at a part of the SaaS ecosystem that is increasingly decisive for product capability: securing and structuring access to compute and infrastructure. While many SaaS businesses abstract away capacity questions behind a single cloud bill, OpenAI’s scale and model-driven products make infrastructure strategy and external partnerships a core lever, not a back-office function.
For SaaS professionals, the career value is in learning how commercial strategy intersects with technical roadmaps when underlying platforms are scarce, expensive, and evolving. The work builds fluency in build versus buy tradeoffs, vendor and hyperscaler dynamics, and the practical economics of serving high-demand workloads. That perspective transfers to any SaaS organization where margins, reliability, or differentiation depend on platform choices and ecosystem relationships.
The role is best suited to someone who prefers cross-functional problem solving over owning a single domain, and who can translate between engineering constraints, financial models, and executive decision making. It will fit a professional motivated by ambiguity and long time horizons, with an interest in how partnerships and market structure shape what software products can deliver.
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
The Industrial Compute team is responsible for building and scaling the infrastructure foundation that powers OpenAI’s research and products. The team works across compute strategy, infrastructure planning, hardware partnerships, and capacity management to ensure OpenAI can meet rapidly growing training and inference demands with resilient, efficient, and future-looking infrastructure systems.
About the Role
As a Strategic Deals Leader, you will help shape OpenAI's long-term approach to AI infrastructure, compute capacity, and strategic ecosystem partnerships. Operating at the intersection of infrastructure strategy, technology evaluation, commercial partnerships, and market development, you will identify and execute opportunities that expand OpenAI's access to the compute, infrastructure, and technologies required to support frontier AI systems.
You will work closely with engineering, infrastructure, finance, and executive leadership teams to evaluate emerging technologies, develop ecosystem strategies, assess build-versus-buy decisions, and cultivate strategic relationships across hardware vendors, cloud providers, data center operators, and the broader AI infrastructure ecosystem.
We’re looking for people who combine deep understanding of AI infrastructure and emerging technology ecosystems with strong strategic judgment, technical curiosity, and the ability to build partnerships across a rapidly evolving industry landscape.
In this Role, You Will
Develop and execute strategies that expand OpenAI's access to compute, infrastructure, and emerging AI technologies.
Evaluate strategic opportunities across hardware platforms, cloud providers, infrastructure partners, and ecosystem participants.
Partner with engineering and infrastructure teams to understand future workload requirements and translate them into long-term compute and ecosystem strategies.
Assess build-versus-buy tradeoffs across infrastructure, platform, and capacity decisions.
Build and manage relationships with hardware vendors, hyperscalers, cloud providers, data center operators, and emerging infrastructure companies.
Evaluate new infrastructure technologies and architectures to inform adoption, partnership, and deployment decisions.
Support commercial discussions and strategic partnerships that improve OpenAI's infrastructure flexibility, resilience, and long-term capacity position.
Monitor market, technology, and competitive developments across the AI infrastructure landscape and develop recommendations for leadership.
You Might Thrive in this Role if You
Have experience in AI infrastructure, cloud computing, semiconductors, data centers, distributed systems, or adjacent technology ecosystems.
Possess a strong understanding of compute infrastructure, accelerator technologies, cloud platforms, and infrastructure economics.
Have experience evaluating emerging technologies and developing long-term infrastructure or ecosystem strategies.
Can work effectively with technical teams and translate complex engineering concepts into strategic business recommendations.
Have experience building partnerships and influencing senior stakeholders across internal and external organizations.
Demonstrate strong analytical and strategic thinking skills, with the ability to operate in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments.
Communicate effectively with both technical and business audiences, including executive leadership.
Are passionate about the future of AI infrastructure and the ecosystem required to support frontier model development.
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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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.
