Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Director, Compute & Infrastructure FP&A role sits at the intersection of SaaS financial planning and the economics of cloud-scale delivery. In subscription businesses, infrastructure is not just a cost center but a core input to gross margin, reliability, and product velocity. Owning forecasting for compute and infrastructure puts the role close to the decisions that determine how a SaaS platform scales capacity while maintaining disciplined unit economics.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work builds durable expertise in translating technical roadmaps into financial narratives executives can act on. Scenario modeling, ROI analysis, and build versus buy evaluations are recurring problems across modern SaaS, especially where usage-based components, AI workloads, or data-intensive features pressure cost structure. Experience building reporting and dashboards around utilization and spend also maps well to broader finance leadership roles that require operational fluency, not only accounting rigor.
This position is best suited to a finance leader who prefers high-ownership planning cycles and frequent cross-functional collaboration with engineering and corporate finance stakeholders. It aligns with professionals who enjoy ambiguity in forecasting inputs, can communicate complex cost drivers plainly, and want their work to influence long-range investment choices rather than only periodic reporting.
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 Role
As a Director, Compute & Infrastructure FP&A, you will own and drive the monthly forecasting process for the Compute & Infrastructure org by partnering with various stakeholders across Finance, Accounting, Tax and Engineering. You will play a critical role in planning and forecasting the company’s largest and most complex cost center ( Compute & Infrastructure ).
You will collaborate cross-functionally to develop long-range infrastructure investment plans, evaluate build vs. buy decisions, and ensure capital is deployed efficiently to support rapid growth. You will also provide strategic financial guidance through scenario modeling, ROI analysis, and performance tracking, enabling leadership to make high-stakes decisions under uncertainty.
What You’ll Do
Own compute financial planning & Forecasting.
Build and manage consolidation models for GPU/CPU capacity, storage, networking, and data center investments.
Translate infrastructure roadmaps into short- and long-term financial forecasts (LRP, annual planning)
Drive infrastructure investment decisions.
Evaluate build vs. buy, vendor vs. owned infrastructure, and capacity allocation tradeoffs.
Develop frameworks for investment trade-offs to guide executive decision making.
Build scalable tooling & reporting.
Implement stakeholder-facing dashboards to track compute spend, utilization, and efficiency metrics.
Improve visibility into unit economics (e.g., cost per training run, cost per inference, cost per customer).
Drive forecasting accuracy & accountability.
Lead budget vs. actual analysis for compute and infrastructure spend.
Identify key cost drivers (utilization, pricing, efficiency gains) and reduce forecast variance.
Support close & financial reporting.
Partner with Accounting to ensure accurate classification of infrastructure spend (OpEx vs CapEx).
Translate complex infrastructure costs into clear insights for leadership.
Enable strategic decision-making.
Build scenario models to support leadership decisions on capacity scaling, new model launches, and infrastructure investments.
Lead ad hoc analyses on emerging topics.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have
10+ years in strategic finance, with experience in infrastructure, cloud, hardware, or compute-intensive environments
Strong financial modeling skills, particularly in capacity planning, unit economics, and scenario analysis under uncertainty.
Experience supporting large-scale infrastructure or cloud spend (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure, GPUs, data centers).
Ability to translate technical concepts (compute usage, model training/inference, system architecture) into financial insights.
Proficiency in Excel/Sheets, SQL, and BI tools (e.g., Tableau); experience with planning systems like Anaplan is a plus.
Strong cross-functional partnership skills, especially with Engineering, Product, and Supply Chain.
Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure cost drivers and the economics of training and serving models.
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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