Deal Lead, Special Situations

About the team

Special Situations builds and grows new businesses, capabilities, and first-of-kind or highly strategic partnerships for OpenAI. We take on opportunities with meaningful upside where the offering, commercial model, partnership structure, or delivery approach still needs to be developed.

We bring together commercial judgment, operating experience, and industry expertise to turn these opportunities into results. Our work spans first engagements, expansion into new markets, and longer-term businesses and partnerships that we help build and scale.

About the role

We’re hiring a Deal Lead to develop and execute some of OpenAI’s most consequential commercial opportunities. You’ll identify where our capabilities can create meaningful value, shape what we offer and how we bring it to market, structure and negotiate partnerships, and drive the work from an initial thesis through launch and growth.

You’ll work closely with Product, Research, GTM, Finance, Legal, and delivery teams to connect customer needs, technical capabilities, and viable economics. This is a hands-on role: you’ll drive the commercial strategy and execution.

In this role, you will:

• Identify and develop high-value opportunities across industries, markets, and emerging capabilities, translating customer needs into concrete AI use cases and commercial opportunities.

• Shape new offerings and business models: define who we serve, what we offer, how we price it, and how we bring it to market.

• Originate and grow customer and partner relationships, building executive alignment around the opportunity, desired outcomes, and path forward.

• Work with FDEs, researchers, Product, and GTM teams to prioritize use cases and define scope, success criteria, resourcing, and a viable delivery approach.

• Structure and negotiate complex partnerships, including revenue sharing, royalties, outcome-based pricing, and other non-standard commercial arrangements.

• Drive executive-level decisions on strategy, economics, resourcing, and risk, keeping internal teams and external partners aligned as the work evolves.

• Drive commercial outcomes beyond signature, including launch, adoption, revenue, viable economics, and expansion.

• Build on early successes to develop repeatable offerings and partnerships, continuing to lead strategic relationships or establishing clear ownership as they scale.

You may thrive in this role if you:

• Have significant experience in business development, partnerships, corporate development, private equity, or founding roles where you personally led complex commercial opportunities from concept through execution.

• Have originated, structured, and closed significant deals—and stayed accountable for what happened after signing.

• Can turn an ambiguous opportunity into a clear commercial thesis, prioritized use cases, viable economics, and an executable plan.

• Bring strong commercial and financial judgment, including experience designing pricing, evaluating business models, and negotiating terms that align incentives.

• Learn unfamiliar industries quickly and bring relevant domain expertise, with an understanding of how sophisticated customers buy, partner, and deploy technology.

• Work effectively with FDEs, researchers, engineers, and product teams to connect technical capabilities with customer value and realistic delivery commitments.

• Build executive alignment across organizations, communicating opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs clearly and driving decisions when priorities differ.

• Are equally comfortable shaping strategy and doing the hands-on work: customer discovery, financial modeling, proposals, negotiations, and resolving execution blockers.

• Create structure and accountability across cross-functional teams without relying on formal authority.

• Exercise sound judgment under uncertainty, adapting as evidence changes and recognizing when to invest more, change course, or walk away.

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.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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