Deal Lead, Special Situations

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:

• Identify and size high-value opportunities within financial services, life sciences, semiconductors, and energy, translating industry pain points into concrete AI-driven commercial theses

• Map the partnership and competitive landscape in your vertical and design differentiated partnership strategies that OpenAI can win and scale

• Work with FDEs and applied researchers to design multi-project programs that combine models, tooling, data, and services into outcomes customers will pay for

• Define use cases, scope, sequencing, and success metrics that turn ambiguous opportunities into executable programs

• Create the technical and commercial narratives (decks, demos, proposals, and deal memos) that align customers, executives, and internal teams around a single plan

• Structure and negotiate non-standard partnerships, including revenue share, royalties, and bespoke commercial terms, through contract signature

• Drive executive-level alignment and decision-making on tradeoffs, resourcing, and risk

You may thrive in this role if you:

• Have 15+ years in business development, partnerships, corporate development, private equity or founding roles where you personally drove and closed complex, high-dollar deals from concept through delivery

• Have deep domain experience in financial services, life sciences, semiconductors, or energy, including an understanding of how large enterprises in those sectors buy, partner, and deploy technology

• Can take a vague opportunity and turn it into a clear commercial thesis that customers, executives, and technical teams can buy into and commit budget against

• Excel at building and closing non-standard deals that combine product, services, and long-term strategic value rather than off-the-shelf SKUs

• Know how to navigate large, sophisticated buyers, align multiple stakeholders, and keep deals moving when no one has full authority or clarity

• Strengthen decisions by framing commercial and technical trade-offs early so partners and OpenAI leadership can commit with confidence

• Maintain momentum as scope, pricing, risk, and partnership structures evolve

• Create structure and accountability across cross-functional teams so that deals actually convert into delivered outcomes

• Deliver results without waiting for perfect information, adjusting the commercial and execution path as reality changes

• Represent OpenAI with credibility and executive presence in customer and partner settings, from first conversation through long-term partnership
  

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.

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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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