---
title: 'Procurement Operations Specialist at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/procurement-operations-specialist-openai-san-francisco-n988eb8ta1jp'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Procurement Operations Specialist at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $162k–$180k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-24
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c9832989-edc1-4f2f-8a79-8fa29f5623e2

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s Procurement team makes working with the world easy, fast, and safe. We connect supplier readiness, purchasing, invoicing, and payment so teams can move with confidence as OpenAI scales.

## About the Role

We’re looking for a Procurement Operations Specialist to support subcontracting and intercompany purchasing and payment coordination for a growing deployment business. You will keep agreements, staffing changes and purchase order (PO) funding aligned, and own the research, supplier communication and follow-through needed to resolve issues. Accounts Payable (AP) handles invoice processing and payments; Accounting owns accounting decisions. You will also manage subcontracting workflows in our deployment operations platform and use OpenAI technology to automate repeatable steps. This combines hands-on operations with building and testing practical AI workflows that improve speed, accuracy and service as the business grows. Location: San Francisco, CA. This role follows a hybrid work model, with three days per week in the office (Monday–Wednesday). In this role, you will:

- Coordinate subcontracting and purchasing from intake through completion: prepare agreement and amendment inputs, track reviews and signatures, and execute approved PO requests and changes.
- Translate staffing, scope, term and engagement-value changes into coordinated updates to agreements, PO funding and billing schedules. Keep the source documents and transaction records connected.
- Lead research and supplier issue remediation across contracts, POs, invoices and payments. Identify the cause, secure corrections, keep suppliers informed and give AP complete supporting evidence. Follow each issue through resolution.
- Serve as the primary contact for intercompany invoice and payment status. Follow up with approvers, investigate stalled handoffs, and coordinate procurement and ERP system issues with AP, Accounting and Finance Systems through resolution. Keep stakeholders informed of progress and next steps.
- Own subcontracting workflow requirements for the deployment operations platform. Build practical AI support for intake, extracting terms, preparing drafts, comparing records and researching exceptions. Test outputs against current sources and validate calculations.
- Partner with Procurement Enablement and Finance Systems to improve workflows and integrations. Measure cycle time, rework, issue aging and time saved, then use the results to prioritize improvements.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Bring hands-on experience in procurement, procure-to-pay, finance operations or a related field, with a record of independently following work through to completion.
- Understand how agreements, approvals, PO funding, invoices and payments connect. You can investigate discrepancies, explain findings to suppliers and coordinate a supported resolution with AP and Accounting.
- Bring practical AI fluency and experience improving workflows with automation. You can show what you built, how you validated results and what improved.
- Work confidently with spreadsheets and procurement or ERP systems, investigate transaction and workflow issues, and coordinate fixes with system owners.
- Build trust through responsive service, careful listening and proactive communication with employees, suppliers and stakeholders. Exercise sound judgment with incomplete information and urgent requests, and follow through to resolution.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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