---
title: 'Professional Services Commercial Lead at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/professional-services-commercial-lead-openai-san-francisco-wk3qvtw2sg5y'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-24'
---

# Professional Services Commercial Lead at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $211k–$234k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-24
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/2183189b-a982-4a81-878a-109d278ed2ee

## Job description

## About the Team

The DeployCo Deal Desk helps turn customer deployment opportunities into clear, executable professional-services engagements. We partner across Deployment, Sales, Legal, Finance, Technical Revenue, and Operations to ensure every deal has a well-defined scope, pricing aligned to approved guardrails, complete approvals, and a clean handoff to delivery. The team sits at the intersection of commercial execution and delivery readiness. We make complex services deals easier to buy—and easier to deliver—while strengthening the templates and workflows that help DeployCo scale.

## About the Role

We are hiring a hands-on Professional Services Commercial Lead to own the end-to-end deal desk workflow for assigned DeployCo professional-services engagements. You will personally draft and revise statements of work (SOWs), validate pricing and deal inputs, coordinate cross-functional reviews and approvals, and ensure commitments are clear, deliverable, and ready to execute. The differentiator in this role is drafting expertise: you have written SOWs, not simply routed them. You can turn technical and delivery inputs into precise scope, deliverables, milestones, assumptions, dependencies, acceptance criteria, fees, and change controls—then keep the deal moving. This is an individual-contributor role for an experienced contract manager, deal desk professional, or professional-services commercial operator who combines strong writing and commercial judgment with disciplined execution.

## What You’ll Do

- Own assigned DeployCo deals from intake through approval, signature, and operational handoff.
- Draft and revise SOWs, work orders, and change orders using approved templates and playbooks; partner with Legal on non-standard contractual terms and redlines.
- Validate rate cards, fees, hours and resourcing inputs, discounts, margin inputs, billing milestones, and key deal data against approved inputs and guardrails; reconcile the SOW to the quote and route exceptions with a clear recommendation.
- Coordinate reviews and approvals across Deployment, Sales, Legal, Finance, Technical Revenue, Billing, and Order Management; surface gaps early and keep stakeholders aligned on next steps.
- Identify and coordinate resolution of delivery and commercial risks, including unclear scope or acceptance criteria, infeasible commitments, scope creep, inconsistent documents, and downstream billing or revenue implications.
- Maintain accurate deal records, approval evidence, and status updates; meet internal turnaround commitments and ensure a clean post-signature handoff.
- Turn recurring issues into stronger templates, playbooks, approval paths, and workflow improvements that increase deal quality and speed.

## What You Bring

- Typically 7+ years of relevant B2B experience across deal desk, commercial contracts or contract management, professional-services operations, sales operations, order management, or a similar function.
- 3+ years of substantial, hands-on experience drafting and revising customer-facing SOWs for professional-services engagements.
- Experience operating pricing-validation, commercial intake, approval, and routing workflows alongside contract drafting and review.
- The ability to translate technical or service requirements into contract-ready scope, deliverables, milestones, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and change controls.
- Sound judgment and independent ownership of complex or non-standard deals, including the ability to recommend a practical path forward and escalate the highest-risk issues.
- Working knowledge of quote-to-cash and how SOW structure and pricing affect delivery, billing, revenue recognition, and the customer experience.
- Clear, concise communication; excellent attention to detail; and the ability to manage multiple time-sensitive deals while influencing partners without formal authority.

## Preferred Qualifications

- Experience as a contract manager supporting customer-facing professional services, consulting, implementation, or managed services.
- Experience in cloud, enterprise SaaS, AI, or another complex technology environment.
- Familiarity with fixed-fee, milestone-based, and time-and-materials services engagements.
- Experience with Salesforce or CPQ, contract-lifecycle-management tools, e-signature platforms, and approval workflow systems.
- A track record of improving SOW templates, commercial playbooks, or deal workflows.

## 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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