Strategic Deals & Commercial Architecture Lead — Marketplaces & Partnership

About the Team

OpenAI’s Finance and Revenue Operations organization builds the commercial infrastructure that enables the business to scale with speed, discipline, and financial integrity.

Within Revenue Operations, Deal Desk partners closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, Legal, Technical Revenue, Finance, Billing, Order Management, and GTM Systems to turn complex commercial opportunities into executable, scalable transactions.

About the Role

We are hiring a Strategic Deals & Commercial Architecture Lead — Marketplaces & Partnerships to own the commercial architecture, execution, and governance layer for marketplace-enabled and partner-led transactions.

This senior individual-contributor role is for someone who combines enterprise deal judgment, marketplace fluency, analytical rigor, and a builder mindset. You will take shaped opportunities from intake through approval and launch readiness, translating first-of-kind structures into clear economics, executable terms, quote-to-cash requirements, controls, and operating mechanisms.

You will partner closely with teams that own business development and partner relationships; this role does not own partner sourcing, pipeline generation, or sales closing. You will support the commercial requirements for onboarding and integration without owning technical delivery.

Success is measured both by the decisions and deals you enable and by the durable policies, systems, and controls you leave behind.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three office days per week and offer relocation assistance.

In This Role, You Will

• Lead the commercial architecture and execution of complex marketplace-enabled and partner-led enterprise transactions from intake through approval, contracting, launch readiness, and operational handoff.

• Structure private offers, pricing, fees, incentives, commitments, revenue share, credits, renewals, amendments, and other non-standard or multi-party terms.

• Evaluate customer and partner value, unit economics, margin, marketplace incentives, precedent, strategic fit, and downstream operability; recommend whether to approve, modify, pilot, or decline.

• Trace proposed terms through contracting, approvals, booking, entitlements, provisioning, metering, invoicing, settlement or payout, reconciliation, revenue recognition, reporting, and auditability; resolve execution gaps before signature.

• Partner with Legal and Technical Revenue to distinguish non-negotiable risk from workable fallbacks and translate conclusions into executable terms, approvals, and preventive controls.

• Establish intake requirements, approval paths, guardrails, exception handling, documentation standards, escalation criteria, launch gates, and decision ownership.

• Translate commercial requirements into workflows across CRM, CPQ, CLM, billing, ERP, data, and marketplace systems; partner with Product and Engineering on scalable capabilities.

• Drive alignment across senior stakeholders with clear options, quantified tradeoffs, and executive-ready recommendations.

• Turn recurring friction into reusable policy, playbooks, SLAs, systems requirements, automation, enablement, and reporting.

• Define and track transaction volume, deal cycle time, exception rates, manual touches, launch readiness, booking or billing accuracy, and standardization opportunities.

We’re Looking for Someone With

• Typically 7+ years of progressively responsible experience in Deal Desk, Deal Strategy, Commercial or Revenue Operations, marketplace operations, pricing, or a related enterprise technology function, with demonstrated senior individual-contributor scope.

• Personal ownership of complex, non-standard enterprise or partner-led transactions from ambiguity through measurable outcome.

• Strong commercial and financial judgment across pricing, commitments, fees, incentives, credits, and multi-party economics.

• Marketplace fluency across commercial economics, partner onboarding, integration requirements, launch readiness, lifecycle governance, and performance metrics.

• Working knowledge of the quote-to-cash lifecycle and its contracting, booking, billing, accounting, reporting, and control implications.

• A track record of converting bespoke work into scalable policies, approval paths, processes, systems, controls, or automation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with B2B marketplaces, digital platforms, strategic partner ecosystems, or other marketplace-enabled commercial models.

• Experience with private offers, committed-spend structures, revenue sharing, multi-party billing, settlement, or payouts.

• Familiarity with entitlements, provisioning, metering, usage reporting, billing adjustments, and reconciliation.

• Experience translating commercial requirements into Product, Engineering, or systems roadmaps.

• Experience supporting new monetization models, partner programs, pricing changes, or product launches.

• Familiarity with Technical Revenue, accounting, controllership, audit, finance, trust, risk, or compliance considerations in complex transactions.

You Might Thrive in This Role If You

• Enjoy building structure in an emerging commercial motion.

• Are equally comfortable leading a consequential deal and improving the system behind it.

• Balance commercial urgency with financial integrity, ecosystem trust, operational discipline, and customer outcomes.

• Form a clear point of view with incomplete information and change it when the evidence changes.

• Move fluently between transaction-level details and executive-level communication.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means faster, higher-quality commercial decisions; fewer avoidable contracting, booking, billing, and operational exceptions; and marketplace-enabled transactions supported by clear guardrails, reliable workflows, and measurable performance. Recurring friction becomes shipped policy, systems, controls, automation, or enablement—not permanent manual work.

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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