Head of Deal Strategy, EMEA

About the Role OpenAI is seeking a senior, hands-on commercial leader and builder to establish and scale Deal Strategy across EMEA while personally shaping and executing some of our most complex and high-impact commercial opportunities. As AI becomes increasingly important to how organizations operate, the ability to translate sophisticated products and commercial structures into clear, compelling customer narratives is a strategic advantage. This is a builder role that will begin as a high-impact individual contributor. The successful candidate will establish the EMEA Deal Strategy motion hands-on with the potential over time to build and lead a broader regional team. In this role, you will serve as the EMEA Deal Strategy leader and an embedded strategic partner to account teams, with a particular focus on high-value, complex, and first-of-kind deals. You will work directly with sellers and cross-functional partners to personally lead the overall deal strategy, structuring, value narrative, negotiations, and business cases that bring business terms to contractual closure. You will also translate insights and patterns from individual deals into a regional operating model, practical frameworks, tools, and resources that improve the quality, consistency, and scalability of deal execution across the field. This role partners closely with Sales, Pricing, Deal Desk, Strategy, Revenue Operations, Finance, Product, and Legal to help OpenAI move quickly, strengthen proposal quality, and navigate complex commercial opportunities effectively. In this role, you will: - Partner directly with EMEA account teams on complex, high-value, and strategic opportunities, from initial deal strategy through customer proposal, negotiation, and deal closure. - Develop deal strategies that bring together customer priorities, commercial considerations, competitive positioning, and OpenAI’s broader business objectives. - Create executive- and CFO-ready proposals, ROI analyses, value narratives, and business cases for highly complex and/or first-of-kind deals. - Support critical customer and executive conversations by presenting recommendations, business cases, and the rationale behind proposed commercial approaches. - Build and maintain practical ROI frameworks, calculators, proposal templates, and value narratives that account teams can apply across opportunities. - Contribute to scalable deal-support mechanisms, including negotiation playbooks, deal clinics, office hours, and structured intake processes. - Partner with Pricing, Deal Desk, Finance, Product, Legal, Revenue Operations, Enablement, and Strategy to ensure deal recommendations reflect current products, commercial guidance, and business priorities. - Turn lessons from strategic and bespoke deals into reusable resources that improve speed, consistency, and seller productivity. - Apply AI to improve deal workflows and scalability through tools such as automated deal briefs, knowledge retrieval, guided proposal development, and self-service resources. - Identify recurring themes across strategic deals and share insights that can inform future commercial approaches, field motions, products, and policies. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 8+ years of progressively responsible experience in deal strategy, strategic sales, strategic pricing, commercial strategy, or a related function, ideally with regional or multi-market scope. - Experience partnering directly with sales teams on highly complex, high-value, or first-of-kind commercial opportunities. - A track record of personally developing deal strategies, customer proposals, ROI models, or business cases that advanced commercial outcomes and created broader organizational impact. - Strong communication and storytelling skills, with the ability to translate complex products and commercial concepts into clear, compelling customer narratives. - Financial and analytical rigor, including experience developing ROI analyses and executive- or CFO-ready materials. - Experience leading through influence across Sales, Finance, Product, Legal, Pricing, and Operations to navigate complex commercial decisions and align senior stakeholders. - Strong judgment and the ability to bring structure and clarity to ambiguous or highly bespoke commercial situations. - A hands-on leadership approach: you are comfortable starting as an individual contributor, working directly with account teams and customers in fast-moving deal cycles, and building credibility through execution. - Demonstrated leadership potential—such as setting direction, mentoring others, building programs or operating rhythms, and mobilizing cross-functional teams—whether or not you have previously held formal people-management responsibility. - Familiarity with using AI to improve workflows, scale expertise, and increase productivity. 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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