Program Manager, Procurement Center of Excellence

About the Team

The Procurement organization enables OpenAI's mission by ensuring every dollar is spent responsibly, compliantly, and efficiently. Within Procurement, the Center of Excellence (COE) team is responsible for designing and scaling the processes, systems, governance, and operating models that enable Procurement to grow effectively alongside the business.

This role partners closely with Procurement and cross-functional teams to simplify how work gets requested, routed, approved, and managed across the spend lifecycle. By combining program leadership, process design, and change enablement, we help Procurement scale while maintaining strong controls and delivering an exceptional experience for employees and business partners.

About the Role

As a Procurement Program Manager, you will lead complex, cross-functional initiatives that span Strategic Sourcing, Procure-to-Pay (P2P), Extended Workforce, Travel & Expense, Corporate Card, Risk, Legal, Finance, and Technology teams. You will not only drive project and program execution, but also actively contribute to solution design, requirements development, process optimization, testing, rollout planning, and stakeholder alignment.

This is a highly collaborative role for someone who thrives in fast-moving environments, can bring structure to ambiguity, and is equally comfortable facilitating executive discussions, building project plans, and rolling up their sleeves to help move initiatives forward.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Lead cross-functional procurement transformation programs spanning Strategic Sourcing, P2P, Extended Workforce, T&E, Corporate Card, Risk, and Procurement Systems.

• Develop and maintain the Procurement transformation roadmap, partnering across teams to identify opportunities, prioritize initiatives, map dependencies, sequence work effectively, and align investments against strategic business objectives.

• Translate business needs into scalable requirements, partnering with Procurement SMEs and EPT to design processes, workflows, controls, reporting, and user experiences.

• Drive quarterly planning and execution, maintaining visibility into milestones, risks, dependencies, resource needs, and delivery timelines across multiple concurrent initiatives.

• Contribute directly to project delivery, including requirements gathering, process design, testing coordination, documentation, rollout planning, training, and change enablement.

• Partner with Procurement verticals to accelerate execution, helping teams define problems, structure workstreams, develop solutions, and move projects from idea to implementation.

• Lead governance and operating rhythms, including project reviews, leadership updates, status reporting, issue escalation, and decision tracking.

• Coordinate cross-functional implementations involving Procurement, Legal, Finance, Security, Privacy, Risk, and Enterprise Platform Technology teams.

• Develop executive-ready communications and reporting, translating complex programs into clear updates, recommendations, risks, and outcomes.

• Define success metrics and measure outcomes, leveraging data and insights to evaluate adoption, operational performance, process effectiveness, and business impact.

• Support continuous improvement efforts, identifying opportunities to streamline processes, improve user experiences, strengthen controls, and scale operations through automation, analytics, and AI.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Excel at turning ambiguity into action, creating clarity and momentum in environments where priorities, requirements, and timelines evolve quickly.

• Are highly organized without being rigid, balancing competing priorities while maintaining focus on outcomes.

• Enjoy operating at both strategic and tactical levels, moving seamlessly between executive discussions and hands-on execution.

• Build strong relationships across diverse stakeholder groups, influencing without direct authority and bringing teams together around shared goals.

• Have a systems mindset, understanding how processes, technology, data, and controls work together to create scalable solutions.

• Take ownership beyond traditional program management, proactively identifying gaps, solving problems, and helping teams move work forward.

• Communicate with precision and empathy, adapting your approach to technical, operational, and executive audiences.

• Are energized by fast-paced, evolving environments, where priorities shift, new challenges emerge, and adaptability is essential.

• Are excited about leveraging AI, automation, and technology to improve experiences, increase efficiency, and enable Procurement to scale.

Preferred Qualifications

• 7–10+ years of experience in project/program management, business operations, procurement operations or strategic sourcing, process transformation, consulting, or related fields.

• Demonstrated success leading complex cross-functional initiatives involving multiple stakeholders and competing priorities.

• Experience translating business requirements into scalable operational processes, system enhancements, or technology solutions.

• Strong understanding of procurement, purchasing, sourcing, finance, risk, legal, or operational workflows.

• Experience partnering with technology teams to design, implement, and scale business processes and systems.

• Proven ability to drive execution in high-growth, rapidly changing, and ambiguous environments.

• Strong project management, communication, facilitation, and stakeholder management skills.

• Experience with procurement and enterprise platforms such as Zip, Oracle, OneTrust, Navan, Brex, VNDLY, Salesforce, or similar systems.

• Experience supporting change management, enablement, training, and organizational adoption efforts.

• Enthusiasm for building scalable processes, enabling operational excellence, and leveraging AI and automation to improve business outcomes.

What success looks like:

You help Procurement move faster by creating alignment across teams, translating business needs into scalable solutions, and driving critical initiatives from idea to execution. You are equally effective facilitating executive decision-making, coordinating complex programs, and contributing directly to the work needed to make projects successful.

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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