Senior Procurement Manager – Infrastructure Complex Deals
About The Position
The Senior Procurement Manager owns procurement execution for complex infrastructure deals, including land transactions, lease agreements, power purchase agreements, and fast-moving colocation and fiber engagements. Scope may expand to cloud service provider engagements and sourcing activities as business needs evolve. This senior individual contributor role combines hands-on lifecycle management, commercial judgment, and the development of scalable operations. The role identifies gaps in supplier engagements, collaborates with business owners, sourcing, Legal, and Finance to address them, and translates agreements into executable purchasing and payment plans. It also builds standard processes and automation to increase speed and reduce deal risk. The position is part of Hardware Procurement Operations, which enables OpenAI’s hardware and infrastructure businesses to execute supplier engagements and purchases efficiently while maintaining financial discipline, clear ownership, and effective controls. The team’s work spans procurement execution, process and systems enablement, and lifecycle governance, including requests, agreements, purchasing, payment, closeout, and asset and inventory governance.
Requirements
- Independently managed complex procurement engagements through post-signature execution and closeout.
- Experience in at least one infrastructure category, such as land, leases, power, colocation, or fiber.
- Ability to distinguish well-structured supplier engagements from those that create avoidable ambiguity or exposure, recommend practical improvements, and recognize when Legal or Accounting judgment is required.
- Understanding of contractual obligations, payment structures, and procurement controls, with the ability to translate them into clear execution plans.
- Ability to independently prioritize time-sensitive engagements, navigate ambiguity, and resolve cross-functional dependencies, seeking guidance on complex or consequential decisions.
- Ability to communicate risks and tradeoffs clearly and influence senior stakeholders without formal authority.
- Experience building repeatable processes in an ambiguous environment.
- Experience using procurement, contract management, and ERP systems and operational data to improve execution.
- Experience delivering workflow automation or AI agent solutions with measurable results and managing their reliability, exceptions, and controls.
Nice To Haves
- Experience across multiple infrastructure categories.
- Experience with CSP commercial models, multi-entity purchasing, milestone payments, or escrow arrangements.
- Experience with Zip, Oracle, Ironclad, or comparable platforms.
- Experience with workflow configuration, low-code tools, APIs, or scripting.
Responsibilities
- Drive assigned engagements from intake and agreement execution through purchasing, ongoing obligations, amendments, renewals, final payments, and closeout.
- Assess commercial and operational readiness; identify gaps in scope, deliverables, acceptance criteria, and payment terms; and drive resolution with appropriate partners.
- Resolve commercial, financial, and operational dependencies, aligning owners on required reviews and approvals.
- Represent procurement operations in deal planning and senior stakeholder escalations, presenting recommendations on commercial readiness, risks, and execution tradeoffs while respecting each function’s decision authority.
- Maintain accurate obligation and purchasing records, and coordinate payment readiness, acceptance evidence, invoice exceptions, and reconciliation with business owners, Treasury, Accounting, and Accounts Payable.
- Establish procurement operating standards and influence business, sourcing, Legal, and Finance partners to adopt practices that improve supplier engagement quality, accelerate execution, and reduce risk.
- Build processes, templates, playbooks, and upstream review cycles that make procurement standards actionable.
- Design, implement, and manage workflow automation and AI agents, partnering with technical teams where needed.
- Own automation and AI agent testing, adoption, monitoring, exception handling, and appropriate human review and approval controls.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
