Procurement Enablement Lead

OpenAI OpenAI · AI Frontier · San Francisco, CA · Finance

This role focuses on improving the procurement process at OpenAI by simplifying workflows, enhancing guidance, and supporting scalable procurement experiences. It involves partnering across departments like Finance, Legal, and IT to translate policies into clearer processes and better-enabled systems. A key aspect is identifying opportunities to use AI and automation to streamline workflows and improve service delivery within Procurement operations.

What you'd actually do

  1. Partner across Procurement, Finance, Legal, Security, Privacy, and Enterprise Technology to improve how procurement work gets requested, routed, approved, and supported across the spend lifecycle.
  2. Help design and improve procurement intake, guidance, and workflow experiences that make it easier for employees and stakeholders to navigate procurement processes.
  3. Translate procurement policies, operational needs, stakeholder feedback, and operational insights into clear business requirements for workflows, automation, reporting, analytics, and process improvements.
  4. Partner with Enterprise Technology and tool owners to support workflow configuration improvements across procurement systems, including approvals, routing, SLAs, escalation paths, exception handling, and reporting capabilities.
  5. Identify opportunities to use AI, automation, analytics, and decision support tools to reduce manual work, simplify employee experiences, and improve service delivery across Procurement operations.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of experience in Procurement Technology, Procurement Operations, Finance Operations, or related operational and systems-focused roles.
  • Hands-on experience with procurement and finance platforms such as Zip, Oracle Fusion, VNDLY, Navan, Brex, or similar workflow and transaction systems.
  • Deep operational knowledge across Source-to-Contract, Procure-to-Pay, Travel & Expense, and Contingent Workforce / Extended Workforce processes.
  • Experience designing, improving, and scaling operational workflows, automation, and service delivery models in complex enterprise environments.
  • Strong analytical and data interpretation skills, including experience working with operational metrics, workflow data, reporting tools, and large datasets to drive process improvements and operational decision-making.
  • Comfortable using data to identify trends, measure adoption, prioritize enhancements, and communicate operational insights to cross-functional stakeholders and leadership.
  • Understand procurement controls and governance, including approval frameworks, audit trail requirements, SOX-aware process design, and risk management in enterprise finance and procurement environments.
  • Experience translating business requirements into scalable workflows and system solutions while partnering effectively with Enterprise Technology, engineering, or systems teams.
  • Strong cross-functional collaboration and stakeholder management skills, and are comfortable working across Procurement, Finance, Legal, Security, Privacy, IT, and business teams.
  • Strong in process documentation and operational playbook development, and can turn complex workflows into clear SOPs, workflow maps, guidance, and knowledge assets.
  • Experience leading rollout, change management, training, and communication efforts that improve adoption and create durable operational change.

Nice to have

  • Experience applying AI tools, including GPT-based capabilities, automation tooling, analytics, or decision support solutions to improve operational workflows and internal service delivery.

What the JD emphasized

  • AI and automation to streamline workflows
  • improve service delivery
  • operational workflows
  • AI tools, including GPT-based capabilities