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OpenAI

Project Manager, Compute Transformation

OpenAI is hiring a Project Manager, Compute Transformation in San Francisco, United States. It pays $278k-$308k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this project manager role: aI is not part of the work.
  • The listed pay starts 150% above the typical project manager posting on Level.
  • The posting allows some remote work.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Databricks and AI research.
  • Level lists 819 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

Databricks
ai-research

About the Team

The Transformation team at OpenAI partners with Finance, Infrastructure, Data, and Engineering to design and scale the business processes and systems that support our growth. Our work combines process design, systems thinking, and operational change to turn fragmented workflows into reliable, repeatable, and well-controlled operations.

We work as embedded partners to Finance, Accounting, and Operations, shaping priorities and delivering improvements across core business processes. For compute, our focus is an accurate, connected view of contractual obligations, delivered capacity, usage, and cost that supports sound decisions and repeatable financial operations.

About the Role

As Program Manager, Compute Transformation, you will lead cross-functional initiatives that connect purchasing, operations, billing, accounting, and financial planning across our compute commitments and our data center initiatives. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with ownership of problem definition, process design, integrated planning, and end-to-end delivery.

You will work across Compute Finance, Infrastructure Accounting, Capacity Planning, Fleet, Design & Construction, Operations, Procurement, Legal, Data, and Engineering. You will turn ambiguous business problems into clear requirements, drive decisions and dependencies, and deliver reliable processes and systems that make compute and infra spend easier to understand, forecast, reconcile, and control.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model of 3 days per week in the office.

In this role, you will:

  • Own an integrated compute and infra transformation plan: workstreams, milestones, critical dependencies, resources, decision logs, and acceptance criteria. Drive execution from problem definition through production adoption.

  • Map current workflows and design scalable processes from demand planning, contracting, delivery & acceptance, receiving & operations, invoicing, payment, and month-end close. Clarify ownership, handoffs, evidence, and exception paths.

  • Enable source of truth systems that cover both operational needs and accounting / finance needs for data center construction, operations, and maintenance.

  • Drive consistent tracking of contracts, tranches, delivery events, and capacity acceptance. Connect committed spend to provisioned, accepted, allocated, and used capacity to support forecasting and financial review.

  • Coordinate reliable ingestion and normalization of cloud service provider usage, billing, invoice, and delivery data. Establish data owners, completeness checks, and traceability to financial outputs.

  • Improve compute billing, accrual, and allocation processes through consistent pricing rules, SKU mappings, telemetry and organizational tags, reconciliations, and controlled handling of manual adjustments.

  • Partner with application, AI, and data engineers to translate requirements into integrations and automation across contract, procurement, compute data, and finance platforms, with monitoring and governed change controls.

  • Align Infrastructure, Finance, Accounting, Procurement, Legal, and Engineering on decisions and dependencies. Manage scope, risks, vendor dependencies, and change requests; escalate with clear options and business impact.

  • Lead end-to-end testing, UAT, rollout, training, and handoff to operational owners. Define success measures for traceability, data quality, manual effort, exception resolution, close readiness, and adoption.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

  • 8+ years of experience in project or program management, finance transformation, infrastructure operations, or enterprise systems delivery in complex, scaled environments.

  • Understanding of compute or infrastructure economics and related finance processes, including commitments, usage-based billing, procurement, accruals, cost allocation, and forecasting.

  • Experience partnering with software and data engineers to define requirements, resolve tradeoffs, test solutions, and deliver changes into production without direct authority.

  • A strong process mindset and the ability to connect contractual terms, operational events, financial data, and control requirements into a practical future-state design.

  • Fluency in data dependencies, system integrations, reconciliation, and data quality. Comfort working with analytical teams and tools such as SQL, Databricks, and BI platforms.

  • Experience improving workflows through automation or AI, with appropriate human review, controls, exception handling, and operational ownership.

  • Clear, concise written and verbal communication, including executive updates that explain decisions, risks, business impact, and specific actions needed.

  • Experience driving complex initiatives through ambiguity and organizational change, with clear evidence of hands-on delivery and adoption. Cloud FinOps, infrastructure finance, or capacity-planning experience is a strong plus.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

How we rate this

Project Manager, Compute Transformation at OpenAI rates 34 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI ResearchDatabricks

Also common in project manager jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$278k
Typical project manager job
$111k

This posting starts 150% above the typical project manager job. See project manager jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. Walk me through how you've used Databricks in your day-to-day work.

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  • List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research and Databricks. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.

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