OpenAI

Tech Lead, Finance & Supply Chain Engineering

OpenAI • $130K — $180K *
San Francisco, CA 94112In-Person
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of professional engineering experience, preferably as a significant individual contributor.
  • Strong understanding of full-stack applications from client architecture to back-end services.
  • Expertise in data engineering including models, pipelines, and data quality assurance.
  • Demonstrated success in designing, shipping, and operating significant systems independently.
  • Proven ability to influence technical decisions and initiatives across teams.
  • A strong commitment to security, auditability, and operational excellence in technical solutions.
  • Excellent communication skills to bridge technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

  • Collaborate as a peer technical leader with software and data engineering managers to elevate team standards.
  • Own the architecture and implementation of high-impact projects, ensuring accountability for outcomes.
  • Drive critical design decisions that influence security, reliability, and system quality across teams.
  • Establish and promote practical engineering standards for API and data contract development.
  • Advance engineering practices in AI development, including monitoring and evaluating workflows.
  • Integrate cross-functional expertise to develop robust and cohesive technical solutions.
  • Enhance team expertise through mentoring, providing guidance, and conducting design/code reviews.

Benefits

  • Flexible work environment promoting autonomy and team ownership.
  • Opportunity to influence significant cross-team initiatives and design decisions.
  • Direct impact on architecture and implementation of high-stakes projects.
  • Chance to work with cutting-edge AI technologies and solutions.
  • A collaborative culture that values shared knowledge and peer mentorship.
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on senior technical leader who will report alongside the Software Engineering and Data Engineering managers. This is an individual-contributor role with no immediate people-management responsibility. The Tech Lead will raise the technical bar across both teams, participate in important cross-team or high-risk design decisions, and directly own and ship high-impact work. The role should improve team judgment and autonomy rather than act as a floating architect or universal approval gate.
In this role, you will:
  • Partner with the Software Engineering and Data Engineering managers as a peer technical leader; managers retain accountability for people, staffing, priorities, performance, and delivery commitments.
  • Directly own the architecture, implementation, launch, and operation of one or more high-impact initiatives, remaining accountable for real outcomes rather than advisory output alone.
  • Guide important design decisions that are cross-team, difficult to reverse, or material to security, financial controls, reliability, data quality, or long-term cost of ownership.
  • Establish pragmatic engineering standards across architecture, APIs and data contracts, testing, security, reliability, observability, lineage, data quality, and operational ownership.
  • Advance engineering standards for building with AI, including agentic workflows, evaluation, telemetry, adoption, and outcome measurement.
  • Work across backend, full-stack, data, and big-data systems, making sound boundary decisions and bringing the right domain experts into the design.
  • Partner deeply with Engineering, Applications, Product, Finance, Supply Chain, Security, and other stakeholders to translate ambiguous needs into durable technical systems.
  • Raise the technical capability of both teams through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, written guidance, and reusable reference implementations.
  • Protect team autonomy: focus involvement on consequential decisions, clarify principles and tradeoffs, and avoid becoming a required approver for routine or reversible work.
You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have significant professional engineering experience with sustained staff-level or equivalent impact as an individual contributor; prior people management is not required, but a plus.
  • Can reason across a full-stack application-from user experience and client architecture through backend services, integrations, authorization, and durable state.
  • Have strong data-engineering judgment across analytical modeling, batch or streaming pipelines, orchestration, lineage, quality, scale, and downstream data contracts.
  • Have personally designed, built, shipped, and operated consequential systems, and can go from architecture to implementation details without relying on positional authority.
  • Have led important technical decisions and cross-team initiatives through influence, clear reasoning, and trusted partnership.
  • Care deeply about correctness, security, data quality, auditability, operational excellence, and measurable outcomes.
  • Communicate clearly with engineers, managers, and non-technical partners; lead with context and principles rather than control.
Nice to Have:
  • Experience building internal products, developer platforms, workflow systems, or analytics platforms used across multiple teams.
  • Experience with LLM applications, durable agents, AI evaluations, plugins, MCPs, or measurement of AI-enabled engineering outcomes.
  • Experience in Finance, Supply Chain, accounting, procurement, ERP, or another domain where controls, reconciliation, and traceability matter.


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
Information Technology
Founded
2015
* Ladders Estimates

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