OpenAI

Director, Compute Finance FP&A

OpenAI • $150K — $200K *
Information Technology
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years in strategic finance, with experience in infrastructure, cloud, hardware, or compute-intensive environments.
  • 2+ years in investment banking.
  • Experience leading an FP&A team at corporate or significant business unit level.
  • Strong financial modeling skills, especially in capacity planning and scenario analysis.
  • Proficiency in Excel/Sheets, SQL, and BI tools; Anaplan experience is a plus.
  • Ability to translate complex technical concepts into financial insights.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure cost drivers.

Responsibilities

  • Own compute financial planning and forecasting.
  • Build and manage models for GPU/CPU capacity and data center investments.
  • Translate infrastructure roadmaps into financial forecasts.
  • Drive infrastructure investment decisions and evaluate options.
  • Develop frameworks for investment trade-offs to guide executives.
  • Create stakeholder dashboards for tracking compute spend and efficiency.
  • Lead budget vs. actual analyses for compute and infrastructure.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment with cross-functional teams.
  • Exposure to high-stakes decision-making at the strategic level.
  • Opportunity to influence significant investments in tech infrastructure.
  • Access to advanced financial modeling tools and systems.
  • Engagement with leaders in finance and engineering sectors.
Full Job Description
About the Role

As a Director, Compute & Infrastructure FP&A, you will own and drive the monthly forecasting process for the Compute & Infrastructure org by partnering with various stakeholders across Finance, Accounting, Tax and Engineering. You will play a critical role in planning and forecasting the company's largest and most complex cost center ( Compute & Infrastructure ).

You will collaborate cross-functionally to develop long-range infrastructure investment plans, evaluate build vs. buy decisions, and ensure capital is deployed efficiently to support rapid growth. You will also provide strategic financial guidance through scenario modeling, ROI analysis, and performance tracking, enabling leadership to make high-stakes decisions under uncertainty.

What You'll Do
  • Own compute financial planning & Forecasting.
  • Build and manage consolidation models for GPU/CPU capacity, storage, networking, and data center investments.
  • Translate infrastructure roadmaps into short- and long-term financial forecasts (LRP, annual planning)
    • Coordinate closely with Corporate FP&A on timelines and process
    • Present insights on a monthly basis to senior management.
  • Drive infrastructure investment decisions.
  • Evaluate build vs. buy, vendor vs. owned infrastructure, and capacity allocation tradeoffs.
  • Develop frameworks for investment trade-offs to guide executive decision making.
  • Build scalable tooling & reporting.
  • Implement stakeholder-facing dashboards to track compute spend, utilization, and efficiency metrics.
  • Improve visibility into unit economics (e.g., cost per training run, cost per inference, cost per customer).
  • Drive forecasting accuracy & accountability.
  • Lead budget vs. actual analysis for compute and infrastructure spend.
  • Identify key cost drivers (utilization, pricing, efficiency gains) and reduce forecast variance.
  • Support close & financial reporting.
  • Partner with Accounting to ensure accurate classification of infrastructure spend (OpEx vs CapEx).
  • Translate complex infrastructure costs into clear insights for leadership.
  • Enable strategic decision-making.
  • Build scenario models to support leadership decisions on capacity scaling, new model launches, and infrastructure investments.
  • Lead ad hoc analyses on emerging topics.


You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have
  • 10+ years in strategic finance, with experience in infrastructure, cloud, hardware, or compute-intensive environments
    • 2+ years in investment banking
    • Must have experience running an FP&A team at the corporate level or business unit level with significant scale.
  • Strong financial modeling skills, particularly in capacity planning, unit economics, and scenario analysis under uncertainty.
  • Experience supporting large-scale infrastructure or cloud spend (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure, GPUs, data centers).
  • Ability to translate technical concepts (compute usage, model training/inference, system architecture) into financial insights.
  • Proficiency in Excel/Sheets, SQL, and BI tools (e.g., Tableau); experience with planning systems like Anaplan is a plus.
  • Strong cross-functional partnership skills, especially with Engineering, Product, and Supply Chain.
  • Familiarity with AI/ML infrastructure cost drivers and the economics of training and serving models.


About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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