Deal Operations, EMEA

About the Role OpenAI is seeking a senior individual contributor to support revenue growth across EMEA by helping sales teams structure and close commercially sound deals. You will balance speed and responsiveness with pricing discipline, consistent processes, and appropriate financial and commercial controls. In this role, you will be the day-to-day Deal Operations partner for EMEA account teams, reviewing pricing, discounts, and commercial terms across new business, renewals, and expansions. You will guide sellers through deal requirements, evaluate non-standard requests, and coordinate the approvals needed to move opportunities through contracting and closure. You will also develop scalable workflows, guidance, and tools that improve deal turnaround times, documentation quality, and consistency across the region. This role partners closely with Sales, Finance, Legal, Pricing, and Revenue Operations, with Product and other teams engaged as needed, to resolve deal issues and support accurate execution from quote through contract and booking. In this role, you will: - Serve as the primary Deal Operations contact for EMEA account teams, managing deal intake, prioritizing requests, and guiding sellers through pricing, review, and approval processes. - Review quotes and proposed commercial terms, including discounts, payment schedules, contract duration, and customer commitments, for accuracy and alignment with pricing guidelines and commercial policies. - Build financial analyses and deal models to assess revenue, margin, discount impact, and profitability, and explain the tradeoffs of proposed deal structures to decision-makers. - Partner with Sales to structure deals that meet customer needs and OpenAI’s commercial objectives, recommending alternatives when proposed terms fall outside established guidelines. - Coordinate deal reviews and required approvals across Finance, Legal, Pricing, and Revenue Operations. Prepare clear recommendations, document decisions, and escalate exceptions to the appropriate stakeholders. - Identify risks in non-standard terms and work with Legal and Finance to resolve contractual, billing, and revenue recognition considerations before execution. - Maintain complete deal records and approval documentation in CRM, CPQ, and contract management systems, and partner with Revenue Operations to align approved terms, executed agreements, and booking information. - Help develop and maintain deal approval policies, escalation paths, pricing guidance, and standardized templates. Improve workflows to reduce bottlenecks while maintaining appropriate controls. - Equip sellers with practical guidance and training on deal requirements and approval processes. Apply AI and automation to improve deal intake, knowledge retrieval, and self-service support. - Track Deal Desk metrics such as turnaround time, approval bottlenecks, exception trends, and quote accuracy. Use recurring deal patterns to recommend improvements to commercial policies, processes, and tools. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 8+ years of experience in Deal Desk, commercial finance, pricing, sales operations, or a related function, preferably in a high-growth technology environment. - Hands-on experience reviewing and structuring complex enterprise deals and supporting quoting, commercial approvals, and contracting processes. - Strong financial modeling and analytical skills, including experience assessing pricing, discounts, revenue, margins, and deal profitability. - Knowledge of enterprise software commercial terms and subscription or consumption-based business models, with the judgment to identify issues that require Legal or Finance review. - Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to explain commercial tradeoffs, make clear recommendations, and coordinate timely decisions across teams. - Experience with CRM systems, configure-price-quote (CPQ) tools, and contract management platforms, along with strong spreadsheet skills. - Attention to detail and a track record of improving approval workflows, documentation, and operational processes as a business scales. - Sound commercial judgment and the ability to manage competing priorities and tight deadlines while maintaining accuracy and appropriate controls. - A collaborative, hands-on approach to supporting sales teams and familiarity with using AI and automation to improve deal workflows and productivity. 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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