Deal Lead, Special Situations (Semiconductors)

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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 10+ 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 meaningful experience in semiconductors or closely adjacent industries, including an understanding of how large companies in the sector buy, partner, and deploy technology
• Do not need to be an engineer, but can speak credibly with technical teams and learn specialized industry language and concepts very quickly
• 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
• Can develop a sharp view of the competitive market and persuasively explain why OpenAI is better positioned than internal AI automation efforts or semiconductor-focused AI services startups
• 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 tradeoffs 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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.