Director of Strategic Finance, Payments & Platform

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

16d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support the organization's long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest-impact outcomes. The Applications Technology Strategic Finance team specializes in managing the financial performance of our products, ensuring alignment between financial objectives and product strategy. We focus on revenue forecasting and analytics, pricing, and unit economics for our products. We are hiring a Director of Strategic Finance, Payments & Platform to serve as the primary finance partner to our Payments and Integrity organizations. This role will be critical in shaping our financial strategy and ensuring the scalability and profitability of our products. You will partner closely across Product and Engineering to accelerate growth, optimize investment decisions, and own financial planning for the Payments and Integrity platform. Responsibilities include driving strategic decision-making, overseeing financial performance, leading quarterly planning, and balancing growth and driving cost efficiency as the platform scales. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in investment banking, consulting, or buy-side investing coupled with operational experience at a fast-paced, scaling company.
• Experience owning budgets for major functional areas within an organization, and working with operators on day-to-day execution to hit targets.
• Experience building and reviewing highly complex models, specifically in payments.
• A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks in financials.
• The ability to distill complex financial data into actionable insights and effectively communicate with leadership.
• Attention to detail and a commitment to accuracy in financial reporting and analysis.
• Enthusiasm for technology and artificial intelligence.
• Experience with SQL or a willingness to learn.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary strategic finance partner for Payments and Integrity Product and Engineering Teams, with direct ownership of the payments and platform fees line item on the P&L, including forecasting, variance analysis, and margin impact as volumes scale.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Business Development to influence payments-related decisions, including checkout design, vendor selection, and commercial deal structures, with a focus on optimizing net revenue and contribution margin.
• Own the end-to-end economics of payments, including processing fees, network costs, chargebacks, refunds, and fraud losses, and translate these dynamics into clear product and pricing tradeoffs.
• Drive payments cost optimization initiatives, including vendor negotiations, routing strategy, regional expansion tradeoffs, and tooling investments.
• Lead quarterly and long-range planning for the payments cost base, ensuring payments economics scale sustainably alongside new monetization models, including emerging commerce and agent-initiated transactions.
• Support special projects to continuously improve, automate, and scale forecasting and reporting tools, processes, and methodologies
• Stay updated on market trends and competitive dynamics to refine financial strategies.
• Collaborate with Accounting and FP&A teams to evolve financial forecasting and reporting processes.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees