OpenAI

Head of Sourcing Enablement & Delivery

OpenAI • $160K — $200K *
Business Services
11 - 15 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 12+ years in strategic sourcing, procurement, or commercial leadership roles
  • Experience in transforming procurement capabilities during rapid growth or change
  • Strong leadership skills with experience in managing teams and developing talent
  • Familiarity with marketing and sales teams, particularly in understanding procurement buyer needs
  • In-depth knowledge of the procurement industry, including technology providers and buyer priorities
  • Proficient in leveraging industry trends, research, and professional networks to inform decisions
  • Experience in deploying AI and automation within procurement processes

Responsibilities

  • Build and lead a high-performing sourcing organization
  • Manage sourcing enablement and operational delivery systems
  • Coordinate sourcing operating rhythms and optimize resource allocation
  • Strengthen contract management and lifecycle processes
  • Define and implement responsibility and decision rights (RACI) within Procurement
  • Facilitate early integration of sourcing in business decisions
  • Develop AI-enabled capabilities for sourcing and contracting
  • Establish a commercial-enablement framework in collaboration with cross-functional teams
  • Leverage procurement expertise in GTM and customer engagement initiatives
  • Drive OpenAI adoption within the procurement industry
  • Ensure compliance with business integrity and confidentiality standards

Benefits

  • Relocation assistance for new employees
  • Hybrid work model: 3 days in the office per week
  • Opportunities for professional development and team growth
Full Job Description
About the Role

We're looking for a senior leader to head Sourcing Enablement & Delivery, leading sourcing operational delivery, contracting enablement, and AI transformation-and building Procurement's contribution to OpenAI's commercial growth. You will build the teams, systems, service model, and cross-functional partnerships that enable sourcing and contracting at scale, helping teams move quickly without losing commercial discipline or accountability.

You will partner with GTM, Sales, and Partnerships to develop Procurement's contribution to OpenAI adoption and commercial growth. Bring procurement-industry knowledge, buyer insights, and lessons from internal AI use into customer engagement, product feedback, and opportunities across the procurement ecosystem.

Reporting to the Head of Strategic Sourcing, you will manage the Sourcing Delivery and Contract Management leaders and shape this new function's priorities, team, and measures of success.

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.

Priorities and what success looks like
  • A focused roadmap: clear choices about what to build first, what to defer, and how progress will be measured.
  • Stronger delivery: capable leaders and teams, faster execution, less rework, and fewer unresolved ownership gaps.
  • AI adoption: sustained use of AI-enabled capabilities, with measurable gains in quality, capacity, and user experience.
  • Commercial results: increased OpenAI adoption across the procurement industry and a measurable contribution to commercial growth, consistent with independent supplier selection and purchasing decisions.


In this role, you will:
  • Build and lead the organization. Hire and develop managers, coach performance, and build succession and leadership depth. Decide how employees, contractors, delivery partners, and AI share the work. Hold leaders accountable for results, capacity, and team health.
  • Own sourcing enablement and delivery operations. Set service commitments and quality standards with the Delivery and Contract Management leaders. Match support to deal complexity and risk, and use internal customer feedback to improve the service. Category and Sourcing leads retain ownership of their strategies and deals, including supplier selection, negotiations, and purchasing.
  • Lead the sourcing operating rhythm. Bring demand, priorities, and capacity into one forward plan, informed by workload and performance data. Work with category leaders to make tradeoffs, resolve dependencies, and follow through on commitments. Provide inputs to Procurement-wide planning and functional business reviews.
  • Strengthen contracting. Partner with Legal and Procurement Operations/COE on contract lifecycle management, approved templates, and negotiation playbooks that improve quality and free category teams to focus on strategic deals.
  • Lead RACI development. Define responsibilities, decision rights, handoffs, and escalation paths within Procurement and across partner teams. Define how the team prioritizes work, allocates resources, and resolves delivery issues.
  • Create mechanisms to bring sourcing into decisions earlier: connect business demand, supplier activity, and renewals-including work outside formal intake-with Sourcing teams, so options can be shaped before commitments and Finance and cross-functional teams can have better visibility.
  • Build and prove AI-enabled ways of working. Own use-case priorities, adoption, and business outcomes for sourcing and contracting experiences that begin in ChatGPT and connect to trusted enterprise systems. Partner with Finance Enterprise Technology on technical delivery and with Legal, Security, and Operations on controls and support, including preserving access restrictions and contractual commitments. Turn what works into reusable capabilities, demonstrations, and product feedback.
  • Define Procurement's commercial-enablement approach with GTM, Partnerships, Legal, and Compliance including program scope, decision rights, purchasing independence, and information-sharing boundaries. Lead Procurement's analysis, coordination, and follow-through for approved programs; GTM owns customer sales. Maintain independent purchasing decision-making and identify and escalate any proposed linkage between OpenAI's purchasing commitments and customer sales.
  • Help define goals and measures of success for Procurement's contribution to OpenAI adoption and commercial growth with Sourcing leadership and cross-functional partners.
  • Bring procurement-buyer expertise into GTM. Own this team's buyer insights and use cases. Work with Marketing, Sales, Product, Customer Success, and Partnerships to shape demonstrations, industry content, and customer conversations, using examples approved for external use.
  • Drive OpenAI adoption across the procurement industry. Work with Sourcing leadership, partners and GTM to explore how Procurement third-parties and partners can adopt and distribute OpenAI capabilities. Contribute industry expertise and evidence from internal use; GTM and Partnerships own commercialization.
  • Partner with Legal and Compliance to embed business-integrity and confidentiality safeguards; implement required disclosures, recusals, and independent-decision making arrangements.
You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have 12+ years of experience in strategic sourcing, procurement, vendor management, or commercial leadership, with strong judgment about supplier choices, negotiations, contracts, and risk.
  • Have built or transformed a procurement capability through rapid growth or change, with clear evidence of better execution, commercial outcomes, or user experience.
  • Have managed managers and developed strong teams through hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, and thoughtful use of internal and external capacity.
  • Have worked in or closely with marketing, sales, or commercial teams, ideally serving procurement buyers. You can turn customer needs into use cases and business cases, and deliver commercial results with partner teams.
  • Know the procurement industry-its buyers, technology providers, service firms, and buying priorities. You understand how to sell to Procurement, including how buyers assess risk, negotiate, and secure internal support.
  • Use industry analysts, market research, buyer conversations, and professional networks to form a point of view on emerging trends and inform roadmaps, partnerships, and GTM priorities.
  • Have turned AI, automation, or enterprise technology into capabilities people use. You can work with technical partners, drive adoption, measure improvements, and recognize where human judgment remains essential.
  • Can set direction when the path is not defined. You prioritize work and resources, explain tradeoffs plainly, and earn support from teams you do not manage. You are curious about AI and willing to test, learn, and change course.


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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