Business Lead, Special Situations

About the Team OpenAI’s Business organization works with customers and partners on some of our most complex and consequential opportunities. These efforts require rigorous strategy, strong operating leadership, and coordinated execution across commercial, product, technical, deployment, and go-to-market teams. About the Role We are hiring a Business Lead to serve as the operating leader for a strategically important initiative anchored in a major partnership. This person will turn an ambitious, cross-functional mandate into a clear strategy, operating plan, decision structure, and set of measurable outcomes. This role combines strategy and operations, product judgment, commercial skills, and the ability to get things done. You will identify the most promising product and customer opportunities, develop a point of view on how our products should work together, shape the commercial approach, and personally drive execution across both organizations. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to own outcomes, not just coordinate work. You will structure ambiguous problems, establish priorities, build trusted relationships with internal and external stakeholders, and work across product, engineering, deployment, and go-to-market teams to remove blockers and deliver results. Success means establishing a durable operating model for the initiative, improving decision velocity, translating strategy into coordinated execution, launching a joint go-to-market motion, landing an initial cohort of customers, and delivering a high-quality enterprise deployment. In this role, you will: - Own the initiative’s integrated strategy and operating plan, including priorities, desired outcomes, metrics, owners, dependencies, and decision points - Structure complex and ambiguous business problems, develop fact-based recommendations, and translate them into clear choices and executable plans - Define success measures and build operating reviews that surface progress, risks, tradeoffs, and required decisions - Personally drive the highest-priority initiatives from problem definition through decision, implementation, and measurable outcome - Translate strategic priorities into well-formed commercial, product, technical, deployment, and go-to-market workstreams - Prepare concise executive decision materials and establish clear governance for strategy, resource, economic, and execution decisions - Identify cross-functional dependencies, resolve blockers, and recommend resource or priority tradeoffs when execution is at risk - Build and run a rigorous internal and external operating cadence that creates accountability, decision velocity, and early visibility into risk - Develop trusted, high-accountability relationships across executive, commercial, product, technical, legal, finance, deployment, and partner teams - Stand up a joint go-to-market motion and drive the first cohort of customers from targeting and value proposition through execution - Develop commercial positions and support negotiations across economics, packaging, delivery commitments, and long-term strategic value - Build an informed perspective on how our products should integrate with, complement, or remain distinct from the partner’s products, and translate that perspective into recommendations for Product, Engineering, and deployment teams You might thrive in this role if you have: - Substantial experience in strategy and operations, business operations, general management, strategic initiatives, or another role centered on solving complex business problems and driving execution - A track record as the accountable operator for consequential outcomes—not only as an advisor, planner, or coordinator - Exceptional structured problem-solving skills, including the ability to move from ambiguous questions to clear analysis, recommendations, and action - Strong analytical and business judgment, with experience defining metrics, evaluating tradeoffs, and using data to improve decisions and performance - Excellent program and operating leadership, with a bias toward simple mechanisms that create clarity, accountability, and execution velocity - Clear, concise executive communication and the ability to produce high-quality written plans, recommendations, and decision materials - Strong product judgment and sufficient technical fluency to understand complex product ecosystems, challenge assumptions, and collaborate credibly with technical counterparts - Commercial judgment and experience contributing to negotiations involving economics, packaging, delivery commitments, or long-term strategic value - Exceptional internal and external relationship leadership, including candid communication, conflict resolution, and expectation management - Experience working across company boundaries with partners or customers; a formal business development or partnerships background is not required - High agency, low ego, sound judgment, and a willingness to do the detailed work required to move outcomes forward - Exceptional follow-through in fast-moving environments with incomplete information 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. 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