Deal Lead, Special Situations
OpenAI•San Francisco, CA
fulltime
Other
15+ years
About The Team Special Situations at OpenAI is the company’s commercial engine for its most complex and consequential opportunities. The team operates where new verticals, partnership models, and customer motions must be invented—before a repeatable GTM or delivery playbook exists—by bringing together product, research, engineering, and GTM leaders around a single outcome.
Many of these efforts begin as “new bets” (new verticals, new customer motions, new partnership models) and mature into repeatable ways of working that shape how OpenAI operates at scale. The team acts as a force-multiplier for the company by accelerating decision-making, aligning stakeholders, and converting complex opportunities into durable results.
About The Role We’re hiring a Deal Lead, Special Situations to stand up new vertical bets across financial services, life sciences, semiconductors, and energy. You will research industries you know deeply, identify where AI can create step-change value, originate and shape multi-project programs with FDEs and applied researchers, package them into compelling technical and commercial proposals, and execute creative, complex partnerships—while keeping executives and cross-functional teams tightly aligned.
Special Situations owns the overall success of each program, including commercial outcomes, while functional teams own execution decisions within their domains. You will engage executive sponsors when decisions have org- or company-level implications. You will set direction, build the coalition required to achieve it, structure the partnership and improve decision quality and velocity. When the work can move without Special Situations, you’ll shift to the next highest-leverage opportunity.
In This Role, You Will
You May Thrive In This Role If You
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.
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Compensation Range: $370K