Head of Hardware Finance

About the Team

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.

About the Role

We are hiring our first Head of Hardware Finance to drive OpenAI’s consumer device and other potential hardware businesses.

We have a strong preference for candidates who can be based in our San Francisco HQ. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will oversee multiple areas of responsibility:

Financial Planning & Analysis

• Develop comprehensive cost models across materials, logistics, inventory, and production

• Lead long-range planning and scenario analysis for hardware operations

• Conduct variance analysis and drive operational insights from financial data

• Build and own P&L, balance sheet, and product specific models for hardware product portfolio

• Perform scenario modeling for supply chain disruptions, tariffs, and commodity price changes

Working Capital & Investment Strategy

• Evaluate capital investments in manufacturing and distribution infrastructure

• Partner across teams to drive working capital improvements through optimizations around distribution strategy, inventory, and payment terms

Strategic Business Partnership

• Serve as financial advisor to Hardware leadership, helping inform capital investment, supply chain, operations, distribution, and pricing strategy

• Partner with hardware engineering and design teams early in the product cycle to inform design-for-cost decisions, tooling investments, and manufacturing scalability

• Assess risks and trade-offs in global sourcing and supplier diversification

• Drive partner negotiations and understand cost inputs and levers to drive efficiency across the value chain

• Support channel distribution efforts including retail management and on-demand forecasting

• Drive pricing analysis and strategy for new product launches

• Develop ROI frameworks to drive understanding of value creation across hardware and software ecosystem

Controls & Reporting

• Partner with accounting on cost accounting standards and inventory controls

• Ensure accurate COGS reporting and product costing
  

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 15+ years of progressive finance experience with significant exposure to hardware, manufacturing, or complex supply chain businesses

• A passion for helping build world-class finance teams and driving business and financial outcomes, as measured on margin improvement, working capital efficiency, forecast accuracy, and execution of cost-reduction initiatives

• A strong ability to critically evaluate opportunities and risks

• Expert modeling skills with best-in-class attention to detail and unwavering commitment to accuracy

• Exemplary ability to distill complex financial information into actionable insights

• Excellent communication skills and “story telling” ability when presenting data insights

• Strong enthusiasm for building the human-computer interface for the AI era

• A track record of building and leading high-performing teams

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San