Strategic Finance, Hardware Product Finance Lead

About OpenAI

OpenAI's mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) which benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings the world's best scientists, engineers, and business professionals together under one organization to accomplish this.

We're building the most advanced AI models and platforms, making it easy for developers and customers to benefit from AI via our suite of products.

OpenAI is expanding into consumer hardware to explore new human-computer interaction experiences. Success in hardware requires world-class financial stewardship across the entire product cost stack, from early design and sourcing decisions to scaled manufacturing and lifecycle cost optimization.

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 Hardware Finance Leader to own financial modeling for product cost, inventory, and manufacturing economics for OpenAI's consumer hardware portfolio. This role is responsible for ensuring that hardware decisions-spanning capacity planning, manufacturing ramps, and inventory builds-are grounded in rigorous, decision-quality financial analysis before capital and material commitments are locked in.

This role sits at the center of Supply Chain, Operations, Manufacturing, Procurement, Product, Accounting, and Tax, and serves as the embedded finance partner for hardware cost, inventory, and capital-commitment decisions. You will build the financial foundation that enables leadership to understand margins, inventory exposure, and downside risk as hardware programs move from NPI through launch and scale.

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 oversee multiple areas of responsibility:

• Serve as the primary finance partner to Supply Chain, Operations, Manufacturing, and Procurement, shaping decisions on capacity planning, ramp profiles, and material commitments.

• Build and own integrated financial models that track COGS, inventory, working capital, cash flow, and P&L across the full hardware lifecycle.

• Model and maintain detailed cost drivers, including BOM structure, CapEx, freight and logistics, yield assumptions, manufacturing variances, tariffs and import duties, warranty accruals, and inventory reserves.

• Own inventory and cash-flow forecasting tied to manufacturing execution, including inventory builds, reserves, obsolescence risk, and launch readiness.

• Maintain cost and risk sensitivity frameworks across volume, yield, ramp timing, mix, and cost-down realization to enable clear, decision-ready tradeoffs.

• Translate product roadmaps and supply-chain plans into financially grounded execution plans, clearly quantifying the financial implications of capacity and ramp decisions.

• Own scenario analysis for volume changes, ramp shifts, and supply-chain disruptions, including impacts to margins, inventory exposure, and cash flow.

• Establish clear escalation paths for material cost increases or inventory risk prior to supplier, tooling, or capacity commitment.

• Establish portfolio-level consistency and governance, ensuring standard costs, inventory metrics, and manufacturing economics are accurate and comparable across programs and generations.

• Partner closely with Accounting, Tax, and Corporate Finance to ensure hardware COGS and inventory exposure are reflected correctly in the P&L and balance sheet, supported by clear standard-cost methodologies, reserve frameworks, tariff accounting, and scalable system flows.

• Contribute to the scaling of the hardware COGS and supply-chain finance foundation, improving modeling rigor, governance, and decision support as volumes and complexity grow.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 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.

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.

Compensation Range: $293K - $325K