Sourcing Delivery Lead

About the Team

Our Procurement team enables OpenAI to scale responsibly, efficiently, and at speed. We partner closely with stakeholders to accelerate business priorities while maintaining strong commercial rigor, compliance, and operational excellence. We run the high volume sourcing engine across the company, including quick turn negotiations, rapid cycle times, complete diligence packages, consistent contract quality, and strong vendor controls. The Sourcing Delivery team ensures Strategic Sourcing can scale without slowing down the business.

About the Role

As the Sourcing Delivery Lead, you will run the high volume negotiation and contracting engine that keeps the business moving. You will support routine, lower spend, lower complexity commercial work that is often time-sensitive and operationally critical. Your team’s speed, judgment, and customer service will directly unblock teams and keep OpenAI operating at pace.

You will lead the front-end of sourcing engagement as a trusted sourcing partner, guiding requests from intake through negotiation and signature. This is not a transactional, system-processing role. It is a commercial leadership function that pairs operational discipline with strong judgment to deliver fast cycle times, predictable SLAs, and consistently high contract quality at scale.

You will lead a team of Category Coordinators, with a Contract Delivery Lead reporting to you, and you will run the sourcing execution layer from first stakeholder engagement through signature, moving quickly within clear guardrails and escalating cleanly when required. You will serve Strategic Sourcing Leads as a core execution partner, turning strategy into practical playbooks and executing high volume, low risk negotiations so they can stay focused on complex deals and long-term priorities.

You will partner closely with Procurement Operations, who owns the enabling systems, policy, and process infrastructure, while your team owns stakeholder engagement, negotiation execution, and contracting throughput. You will also partner closely with Legal to build and maintain contracting playbooks, a clause library, and approved fallback positions that keep standard agreements moving quickly within guardrails.

We’re looking for a leader who has built and run high volume procurement execution and contracting teams in fast-scaling environments, and who brings a high bar for speed, quality, and stakeholder experience.

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. Travel is expected up to twice per year to support distributed delivery operations.

You’ll be responsible for:

• Lead and scale a high-performing sourcing execution organization (Category Coordinators, onsite and nearshore commercial negotiators, plus a Contract Delivery Lead), setting clear standards for speed, quality, and stakeholder experience across high-volume, lower-complexity work.

• Design and run the sourcing execution operating model from first stakeholder engagement through negotiation and signature, with crisp decision rights, clear escalation paths, and predictable SLAs.

• Own low-risk contracting throughput end to end, including disciplined redlining within guardrails, approvals coordination, signature readiness, and post-signature contract hygiene (accurate filing, key term capture, auditability).

• Apply AI intentionally to increase speed and consistency, embedding AI-assisted approaches into workflows (intake triage support, drafting and clause analysis, redline acceleration, diligence checklists) while maintaining confidentiality, controls, and contract quality.

• Co-build with Legal the enablement layer that keeps low risk deals moving, including playbooks, clause library, approved fallback positions, and escalation thresholds that keep standardized agreements moving without compromising risk posture.

• Build the talent and quality system that produces consistent execution at scale, including onboarding, training, coaching, calibration, QA sampling, and rework reduction across a distributed set of resources (including vendor-managed capacity as applicable).

• Ensure complete diligence and clean documentation on every deal, triggering the right reviews (Legal, Security, Finance, Privacy, Risk) with full evidence capture and audit-ready packages.

• Run the business with metrics and operational rigor, owning dashboards and reviews across volume, cycle time, SLA attainment, utilization, quality, exceptions, and rework, then using data to remove bottlenecks and improve throughput.

• Drive process improvement, automation, and tooling adoption, continuously reducing friction and increasing consistency across intake, negotiation, and contracting workflows.

• Maintain an executive-grade operating cadence and stakeholder communications, with proactive expectation-setting, clear timelines, crisp updates, and calm escalation management during high-pressure cycles.

We’re looking for someone with:

• Have built or led a high-volume procurement execution or contract operations function with clear SLA ownership, measurable throughput, and consistently strong stakeholder satisfaction.

• Have designed and managed distributed delivery models, including contractor and BPO capacity, and can translate distributed execution into consistent quality, speed, and judgment.

• Bring strong command of software and services commercial terms and quick-turn negotiations, and can codify that expertise into guardrails and playbooks others execute confidently.

• Operate with a white-glove service mindset under pressure, setting expectations early, communicating crisply, handling escalations well, and driving follow-through in a fast-paced environment.

• Use metrics as a management system, diagnosing bottlenecks and failure modes, prioritizing fixes, and improving cycle time, quality, and exception rates over time.

• Have practical experience applying AI in sourcing and contracting workflows, improving speed and consistency while maintaining confidentiality, compliance, and contract quality.

• Have strong people leadership fundamentals, including hiring, performance management, coaching, calibration, and building a high-accountability culture across a mixed workforce.

• Partner effectively across Legal, Security, Privacy, Finance, and Procurement Operations, driving alignment and clean handoffs without slowing execution.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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 rela