Strategic Technology Negotiations Lead

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

6d•$234,000 - $295,000•Hybrid

About The Position

OpenAI is seeking a Strategic Technology Negotiations Lead to personally lead some of the company's most complex and consequential technology negotiations. This is a senior strategic individual contributor role for an expert negotiator who wants to remain close to the work and personally drive high-impact outcomes. The role involves being deployed against high-priority opportunities where deal complexity, commercial stakes, executive visibility, or time pressure require exceptional negotiation leadership. Initial focus areas include data platforms and infrastructure, such as data lake and lakehouse technologies, observability, and enterprise SaaS, with flexibility to work across other strategic technology areas. The lead will manage negotiations from strategy through execution, aligning decision-makers and driving agreements to closure. This role requires looking beyond the immediate transaction to account for interconnected cost, equity, revenue, partnership, risk, and long-term strategic implications. Success depends on strong economics, sound judgment under pressure, executive credibility, and the ability to bring stakeholders along through difficult decisions.

Requirements

10+ years of experience leading complex commercial negotiations in strategic sourcing, technology procurement, strategic partnerships, deal strategy, corporate development, or a related field.
Expert negotiator who enjoys personally developing the strategy, leading the room, and driving difficult deals to resolution.
Previously managed or led teams and are intentionally seeking a senior individual contributor role centered on direct ownership, influence, and execution.
Personally led large-scale enterprise software or technology agreements with sophisticated pricing, commitment, licensing, consumption, or partnership structures.
Understand enterprise software business models, including usage-based pricing, multi-year commitments, ramp structures, pooled consumption, growth protections, and performance-based economics.
Can evaluate a deal across cost, revenue, equity, partnership value, supplier leverage, risk, and long-term ecosystem implications.
Negotiated agreements involving data platforms, infrastructure software, observability, enterprise SaaS, or similarly complex technology categories.
Can engage credibly with deeply technical teams and influence senior executives through structured thinking, clear communication, and sound commercial judgment.
Remain effective under pressure, build alignment among stakeholders with competing objectives, and know when to challenge, escalate, create alternatives, or close.

Responsibilities

Personally lead complex, high-value, and business-critical technology negotiations from initial strategy through signed agreement.
Develop fact-based negotiation plans that define objectives, leverage, alternatives, sequencing, roles, decision points, and escalation paths.
Rapidly synthesize technical requirements, supplier economics, market dynamics, adoption patterns, dependencies, and business priorities.
Partner with leaders across Engineering, Research, IT, Systems, Finance, Legal, Corporate Development, and other teams to establish a unified negotiation strategy.
Assess each negotiation within the broader supplier ecosystem, identifying interconnected relationships that may create value, constraints, dependencies, or leverage.
Shape complex deal structures with cost, equity, revenue, partnership, risk, and long-term strategic implications.
Advise executives through clear, decision-ready narratives covering deal strategy, financial impact, alternatives, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations.
Lead supplier engagement at working-team and executive levels, including difficult escalations and negotiations conducted under significant pressure.
Create commercial structures that deliver meaningful savings and cost avoidance while improving scalability, flexibility, performance, and risk allocation.
Turn lessons from major negotiations into reusable playbooks, market intelligence, and stronger negotiation practices for Strategic Sourcing.