Contract Manager, Infrastructure

About the Team

OpenAI's Legal team plays a crucial role in furthering OpenAI's mission by tackling innovative, fundamental legal issues in AI. If you're passionate about doing significant and unique work as a technology lawyer, this team is for you. The team comprises legal professionals from diverse fields, including technology, privacy, IP, corporate, cybersecurity, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation.

About the Role

OpenAI is experiencing rapid growth, driving significant expansion in both our product offerings and infrastructure needs. Given the speed of OpenAI’s innovation, significant growing transaction volumes, and ambitious infrastructure buildouts, hiring a qualified Contracts Manager dedicated primarily to managing commercial and infrastructure transactions is an urgent and critical need. This role will directly enable OpenAI’s business objectives by streamlining and advancing the contracting processes essential to our mission-critical AI products, systems, and rapidly expanding infrastructure and hardware initiatives.

Skills/experience needed

• 5+ years experience

• Must have contract management experience, with at least 3+ years of experience supporting technology transactions

• Strongly preferred substantive knowledge of software agreements, services agreements, strategic partnerships, and infrastructure / compute agreements

• Have excellent verbal and written communication, analytical, collaboration, and interpersonal skills

• Be motivated self-started who is able to multi-task and juggle multiple priorities in a dynamic environment

• Proactively take ownership of projects by setting and achieving milestones and synthesizing input from cross-functional partners

• Have solid organizational skills, a strong sense of ownership, and enthusiasm about AI technology

• Ability to be scrappy and enjoy being continually challenged and can demonstrate sound judgment in ambiguous situations.

In This Role You Will:

• Draft, negotiate, analyze, and execute complex commercial agreements, including customer contracts, vendor agreements, and strategic partnership arrangements, particularly focused on infrastructure-related deals such as compute resources, data center agreements, and procurement initiatives. 

• Develop, standardize, and manage templates and contracting processes to effectively manage increasing transaction volumes, and empowering the business to self-serve standard agreements.

• Proactively identify and implement scalable process improvements to enhance contracting efficiency, reduce cycle times, and mitigate risks associated with rapid growth.

• Collaborate closely with Product, Sales, Infrastructure, Finance, and Procurement teams to deliver solutions-oriented outcomes aligned with OpenAI's strategic priorities. 

• Maintain flexibility and adaptability in a dynamic environment; as part of a lean, high-impact legal team, each team member contributes across multiple areas. The candidate will have opportunities to support various domains based on their expertise, interests, and the organization's evolving needs.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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