Procurement Operations Specialist

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. About the Role We’re looking for a Procurement Operations Specialist to support subcontracting and intercompany purchasing and payment coordination for a growing deployment business. You will keep agreements, staffing changes and purchase order (PO) funding aligned, and own the research, supplier communication and follow-through needed to resolve issues. Accounts Payable (AP) handles invoice processing and payments; Accounting owns accounting decisions. You will also manage subcontracting workflows in our deployment operations platform and use OpenAI technology to automate repeatable steps. This combines hands-on operations with building and testing practical AI workflows that improve speed, accuracy and service as the business grows. Location: San Francisco, CA. This role follows a hybrid work model, with three days per week in the office (Monday–Wednesday). In this role, you will: - Coordinate subcontracting and purchasing from intake through completion: prepare agreement and amendment inputs, track reviews and signatures, and execute approved PO requests and changes. - Translate staffing, scope, term and engagement-value changes into coordinated updates to agreements, PO funding and billing schedules. Keep the source documents and transaction records connected. - Lead research and supplier issue remediation across contracts, POs, invoices and payments. Identify the cause, secure corrections, keep suppliers informed and give AP complete supporting evidence. Follow each issue through resolution. - Serve as the primary contact for intercompany invoice and payment status. Follow up with approvers, investigate stalled handoffs, and coordinate procurement and ERP system issues with AP, Accounting and Finance Systems through resolution. Keep stakeholders informed of progress and next steps. - Own subcontracting workflow requirements for the deployment operations platform. Build practical AI support for intake, extracting terms, preparing drafts, comparing records and researching exceptions. Test outputs against current sources and validate calculations. - Partner with Procurement Enablement and Finance Systems to improve workflows and integrations. Measure cycle time, rework, issue aging and time saved, then use the results to prioritize improvements. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring hands-on experience in procurement, procure-to-pay, finance operations or a related field, with a record of independently following work through to completion. - Understand how agreements, approvals, PO funding, invoices and payments connect. You can investigate discrepancies, explain findings to suppliers and coordinate a supported resolution with AP and Accounting. - Bring practical AI fluency and experience improving workflows with automation. You can show what you built, how you validated results and what improved. - Work confidently with spreadsheets and procurement or ERP systems, investigate transaction and workflow issues, and coordinate fixes with system owners. - Build trust through responsive service, careful listening and proactive communication with employees, suppliers and stakeholders. Exercise sound judgment with incomplete information and urgent requests, and follow through to resolution. 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 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. 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