Senior Manager, Accounts Payable - Compute

About the Team OpenAI’s Procurement team makes working with the world easy, fast, and safe. We connect supplier readiness, purchasing, invoicing, and payment so teams can move with confidence as OpenAI scales. Accounts Payable and Supplier Master Data Operations provide the trusted data, dependable execution, and financial discipline behind that experience. About the Role OpenAI’s compute infrastructure depends on controlled execution of significant supplier spend. As Senior Manager, Accounts Payable — Compute, you will own payment readiness and material exceptions across large-value, business-critical obligations. Complex agreements evolve through amendments to pricing, capacity, service credits, billing mechanics, legal entities, and payment schedules. You will translate approved obligations into accurate, timely payments while navigating supplier disputes, late approvals, close deadlines, and cross-system dependencies. We’re looking for a hands-on technical and operational leader who can interpret complex payment terms, reconcile financial data, diagnose system failures, and build scalable workflows. Coordinating across multiple Compute Finance and Accounting teams is a core responsibility: you will establish decision owners, align deadlines, and move interdependent work forward in parallel. You will set the compute AP operating plan and lead delivery with Procurement, Treasury, Tax, Finance Systems, and existing processing teams, with measurable improvements in controls, service, and capacity. Location: 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. In this role, you will: - Own the compute invoice-to-payment operating plan, prioritize material exceptions, and lead supplier escalations across complex, high-value obligations and tight payment deadlines. - Interpret executed contracts and approved amendments affecting pricing, capacity, credits, billing mechanics, entities, and payment schedules; translate them into invoice-validation, PO/change-order, approval, control, and payment requirements. - Personally investigate discrepancies, supplier disputes, missing credits, duplicate risks, and PO coverage gaps. Trace records, field mappings, approval statuses, and sync failures across procurement and ERP systems; resolve root causes with accountable Finance, Procurement, supplier, and Systems partners. - Lead a payment-readiness cadence across Compute Finance and Accounting teams, consolidate the complete obligation and payment view, and resolve dependencies across charge validation, PO coverage, approvals, funding, and close. Track decision owners, deadlines, blockers, and escalation paths so material payments move forward as approval lands. - Confirm supplier, site, entity, tax, payment-method, and approval readiness with the relevant owners before payment release. - Coordinate funding forecasts and close-period payments with Treasury; reconcile invoice aging, payment registers, and bank/settlement evidence to support Accounting’s completeness and cutoff conclusions. - Design matching tolerances, validation rules, exception routing, evidence requirements, and escalation thresholds with control and accounting partners, preserving independent verification and segregation of duties. - Map compute workload and usable capacity by task and complexity, assign eligible work across employees, contractors, and shared-service teams, and maintain trained backups and close coverage. Coach task owners and backups, strengthen execution standards, and build greater team autonomy. - Set a prioritized improvement roadmap tied to compute business needs. Own requirements and acceptance criteria for workflow and AI improvements; lead operational testing and adoption with Finance Systems and Enablement, verify reconciliation and fallback, and measure service, risk, and verified capacity outcomes. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring 8+ years in AP, payments, or related finance operations, or equivalent experience, with personal ownership of complex, high-value supplier obligations and material exceptions from executed contract through invoice approval, payment, and settlement. - Bring strong judgment on controls, segregation of duties, supplier verification, reconciliations, and close support in an audited environment. - Can interpret complex pricing, capacity, credit, billing, and payment terms and translate contract amendments into executable workflows, matching rules, and clear decision ownership. - Have led coordination across multiple finance and accounting teams on material payments, reconciled competing priorities and deadlines, and established clear decisions, handoffs, and escalation paths with suppliers and partners. - Have independently led cross-functional operating improvements and delivery teams, built demand-and-capacity plans, maintained peak and backup coverage, and demonstrated measurable results while staying close to execution. - Can independently reconcile large financial datasets using advanced spreadsheets or comparable analytical tools, establish complete populations and control totals, and diagnose ERP workflow, data, and integration failures. Oracle Fusion and Zip experience is helpful. - Have demonstrated practical application of AI in finance or operations, with measurable gains in accuracy, speed, or capacity. Can translate business and control requirements into testable workflows and lead UAT, with human review, exception handling, reconciliation, fallback, and ongoing monitoring. - Experience with cloud infrastructure, compute, data centers, or similarly complex supplier arrangements is required. 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. 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