Strategic Research Associate in San Francisco

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for a high-performing strategic finance professional to join our growing Finance team. This role is ideal for someone with 3 - 4 years of experience across investment banking, venture capital, private equity and/or strategic finance who wants broad exposure to company-building inside a fast-scaling AI infrastructure company. Experience in strategic finance is a plus, but not required. You’ll work closely with Finance leadership and partner cross-functionally across the Finance leadership team. THE RESPONSIBILITIES Support company-wide financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting processes Build and maintain operating and financial models across revenue, infrastructure costs, hiring, and strategic initiatives Help prepare board materials, investor updates, and fundraising analyses Partner with business leaders to evaluate investments, acquisitions, pricing, growth initiatives, and operational tradeoffs Analyze consumption and infrastructure metrics including ARR, gross margin, usage trends, retention, and efficiency metrics Drive ad hoc strategic projects including market analysis and scenario planning Improve financial reporting processes, dashboards, and operational rigor as the company scales Act as key data and modeling lead on reporting and analysis Assist with finance operations, procurement, and vendor management as needed Work cross-functionally to turn ambiguous business questions into

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 We’re growing our world-class Legal team and seek an experienced counsel to lead our global hardware IP portfolio initiatives, including patent, trademark and other intellectual property matters related to our business. This role is highly cross-functional across OpenAI, including work across our Legal, Communications, Global Affairs, Product, Research and Executive teams. 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: Own global hardware IP initiatives, including setting and executing on the strategic direction and management of our hardware IP portfolio. Create scalable processes internally and externally with outside counsel to build, maintain and protect our hardware IP portfolio. Developing and maintaining internal hardware IP policies and programs. Engaging externally on hardware IP policy issues. Advising on strategic hardware IP deals. Advising on hardware IP issues, ranging from patent, trademark, trade secret to open source. Developing and building internal AI expertise, processes and tools to facilitate legal team work. Experience advising on complex technology transactions and inbound technology licensing. You might thrive in this role if you: Have at least 10+ years of combined hardware IP experience at innovative technology companies and law firms. Have a JD and license or qualification to practice in CA. Have a strong sense of ownership, are inquisitive and enthusiastic about technology, enjoy being con

About the Team OpenAI’s GTM Data Science team helps shape how our products are adopted, monetized, and scaled across organizations. We work at the intersection of Product, Go-to-Market, Finance, Research, and Data, turning product usage, customer evidence, and market signals into decisions that grow durable enterprise value. We’re looking for a senior Data Scientist to own the analytical strategy for enterprise knowledge-worker adoption. As ChatGPT Work and Codex become capable of research, analysis, document creation, spreadsheets, presentations, internal knowledge synthesis, and other agentic workflows, you will help determine how these products become embedded in everyday work—not merely tried once. About the Role You will define how we measure activation, retained usage, workflow depth, and value across ChatGPT Work, Codex, and connected enterprise systems. You will explain why adoption succeeds or stalls and identify the product, enablement, and commercial interventions most likely to create durable usage. This is a hands-on, zero-to-one role. You will work through imperfect telemetry, overlapping product surfaces, evolving definitions, and ambiguous business questions. You will partner closely with GTM, Product, Finance, Research, Customer Deployment, Analytics Engineering, and Data Science. Your work is successful when it changes a product, GTM, or investment decision. In This Role, You Will Define a trusted measurement framework for knowledge-worker adoption, including identity, eligible populations, activation, retained usage, penetration, workflow depth, feature adoption, and monetization. Map the knowledge-worker journey from initial exposure through first successful task, repeated workflows, multi-surface usage, and durable adoption. Identify which personas, functions, use cases, product capabilities, and account conditions are associated with deep and retained usage. Design and evaluate experiments and quasi-experiments across onboarding, enablement, wo

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the world’s most exceptional talent under one roof to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our Research Recruiting team plays a critical role in this effort. We are an embedded part of the research organization—working side by side with our research staff to deeply understand evolving priorities, build trust, and strategically shape the future of OpenAI’s talent. About the Role We are looking for a highly strategic recruiter to work closely with the Head of Research Recruiting on a small set of unusually important, high-touch searches and candidate relationships. This role will focus on exceptional talent who does not move through a standard recruiting process: highly visible researchers, technical leaders, operators, and other special-interest candidates where timing, discretion, market intelligence, and tailored engagement matter as much as process execution. This is not a conventional req-based recruiting role. You will help identify where the market is moving, develop intelligence on top talent and competitor activity, translate that intelligence into action, and orchestrate bespoke recruiting strategies for candidates who require a more nuanced path into OpenAI. You should be able to translate these signals and states into clear, actionable advice for leaders and then make it happen. In this role, you will: Partner directly with the Head of Research Recruiting and research leadership team to define priority talent targets and shape bespoke engagement strategies. Build and maintain deep market intelligence across frontier AI, research, engineering, and adjacent talent ecosystems, including competitor movement, candidate motivations, and relationship context. Proactively identify, map, and cultivate exceptional high-profile talent before there is a formal or standard hiring process attached. Translate weak signa

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing together world-class scientists, engineers, and business leaders to translate frontier research into real-world impact. Within OpenAI, the Go-to-Market organization helps customers understand, adopt, and scale our products across their businesses. The team includes Sales, Solutions, Support, Marketing, Partnerships, and Strategic Pursuits professionals who work together to bring the benefits of AI to organizations globally. About the Role At OpenAI, we're building toward an agent-first world where AI systems reason, act, transact, and create alongside people and businesses. As agents become a primary interface for work, the Strategic Pursuits Team leads our most complex enterprise opportunities and helps define how customers adopt OpenAI at scale. We're seeking a Strategic Pursuits Lead to shape and close high-impact enterprise opportunities across Frontier, AI Solutions, ChatGPT, Codex, API, and emerging offerings. This person partners with customers, account teams, Product, FDE, Legal, Finance, GTM, and executives to turn ambiguous demand into a clear vision, business case, commercial structure, delivery path, and repeatable GTM motion. This is a builder role for someone who thrives in ambiguity, can operate without a playbook, and is energized by creating the playbook while running the pursuit. The right person brings executive presence, commercial judgment, product intuition, and the ability to make messy work executable. This role can be based in our San Francisco or Seattle offices. We are also considering applications to work remotely from within the U.S. 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 strategic pursuits from early qualification through customer alignment, proposal, commercial structure, and transition in

About the Team Enterprise Marketing helps the world’s largest organizations understand, adopt, and scale AI. We create programs that bring OpenAI’s products, research, and perspective closer to the priorities, decisions, and work of enterprise customers. Some of the most consequential opportunities cannot be served by adapting an existing campaign, event, or playbook. They require a new model: a way for customers to experience what is possible, learn by doing, and turn insight into action. Our team builds and scales those models across markets. About the Role We are looking for a senior program builder to create differentiated executive and enterprise experiences. You will shape the experience thesis, build and test the first version, and help determine whether the work should become part of a broader repeatable program, remain bespoke, or stop. This role focuses on incubation: developing new experiences, strengthening consequential customer moments, and creating the principles and materials needed for durable ownership. Your initial focus will be helping bring a new flagship, hands-on enterprise customer experience to life in San Francisco, developing new executive and practitioner formats around it, and supporting selected strategic-account interventions where a differentiated approach is needed. This is a senior, hands-on individual-contributor role for a builder who combines customer and commercial judgment with original program design and excellent execution. You will work across Sales, Product Marketing, Product, Research, Solutions, Design, Events, Operations, regional marketing, and executive teams. You will be expected to make clear choices, build directly, and stay close to the work until the model is proven and ready for durable ownership. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid model of three days in the office each week and offer relocation assistance. Given the nature of the work, periods of more intensive onsite participation are expected

About the team Platform Partnerships builds and grows the relationships that extend OpenAI products through the world’s most important technology platforms. The team works across Product, Engineering, Research, Go-to-Market, Legal, Finance, Marketing, Policy, and Operations to turn partner opportunities into durable product experiences and business outcomes. We are a small team working on opportunities that rarely arrive with a playbook. We set the strategy, make the tradeoffs, and stay close to execution through launch and scale. About the role We’re hiring a Strategic Partner Manager to own and drive the expansion of a portfolio of OpenAI’s most strategic platform partnerships. You will treat each partnership as a business: set the expansion thesis, align joint product roadmaps, structure commercial opportunities, and translate shared ambition into measurable adoption, usage, revenue, distribution, and product impact. This is a senior individual-contributor role with full-lifecycle ownership—from strategy and negotiation through integration, launch, performance, expansion, and renewal. It is a 0-to-1 builder role, not a coordination role. You will create clarity where the operating model is still emerging, make sound decisions with incomplete information, and step into the details required to move the work forward. The right person can move fluidly between a multi-year partnership strategy and the immediate product, commercial, or operating blocker in front of the team. You will build trusted relationships at the executive and working levels while representing OpenAI’s priorities with clarity and thoughtful pushback. What success looks like Each priority partner has a clear expansion thesis, joint roadmap, governance model, and measurable outcomes. High-priority product integrations and go-to-market initiatives launch with clear ownership, strong readiness, and fewer unresolved dependencies. Partnerships show measurable growth across the outcomes that matter for t

About the Team OpenAI Finance ensures the organization is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission. The Strategic Sourcing & Procurement function plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to deliver impact across research, product development, technology infrastructure, and services by helping the company scale responsibly, securely, and with strong commercial discipline. Our work sits at the intersection of innovation and execution. We partner closely with teams across OpenAI to translate rapidly evolving business needs into scalable, compliant, and economically sound external partnerships. As OpenAI continues to grow at pace, services sourcing is becoming increasingly strategic across the company. Every business unit relies on external service providers in different ways — to extend capacity, access specialized expertise, support operations, and accelerate execution. Done well, Procurement becomes a source of trust and momentum, helping OpenAI move faster with the right partners, stronger commercial outcomes, and the right level of protection. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Strategic Sourcing (GTM) Leader to lead strategic sourcing and commercial enablement for OpenAI’s Go-to-Market organization across B2B and B2C channels. You will manage substantial and rapidly growing spend while shaping sourcing strategies and scalable commercial pathways across Media, Creative, Production, Influencer, Agency, Sponsorships, Analytics, Communications, and Event suppliers in support of high-impact global initiatives. You’ll help evolve our GTM procurement function from reactive deal support into a speed-enabling, scalable commercial engine that delivers cost efficiency, launch readiness, and strong governance in a fast-moving environment. In this role, you will: Develop and execute sourcing strategies across GTM, Brand, Global Affairs, Events, Growth, and Partnership activities—spanning both B2B and B2C channels—that align with our mission and b

About the Team OpenAI's Strategic Sourcing team helps the company scale responsibly, efficiently, and at speed. We partner with leaders across Engineering, Research, IT, Systems, Finance, Legal, and other teams to shape commercial strategies, negotiate critical agreements, and build resilient supplier ecosystems. Our work connects technical strategy, commercial judgment, financial discipline, and execution in support of OpenAI's mission. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Strategic Technology Negotiations Lead to personally lead some of the company's most complex and consequential technology negotiations. This is not a people manager role. It is a senior strategic IC operator role for an expert negotiator who wants to remain close to the work and personally drive high-impact outcomes. We are especially interested in leaders who have managed teams and are intentionally seeking an individual contributor role where their impact comes through judgment, influence, and direct ownership. Rather than owning a fixed category, you will be deployed against high-priority opportunities where deal complexity, commercial stakes, executive visibility, or time pressure require exceptional negotiation leadership. Your initial focus will include data platforms and infrastructure, including data lake and lakehouse technologies, observability, and enterprise SaaS, with flexibility to work across other strategic technology areas. You will lead negotiations from strategy through execution, aligning decision-makers and driving agreements to closure. Many of these negotiations exist within broader supplier and partner ecosystems. You will look beyond the immediate transaction to account for interconnected cost, equity, revenue, partnership, risk, and long-term strategic implications. Success requires strong economics, sound judgment under pressure, executive credibility, and the ability to bring stakeholders with you through difficult decisions. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We u

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team builds next-generation AI-native silicon and systems while working closely with software, research, and manufacturing partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering systems for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team develops the tools, methodologies, and strategic partnerships needed to accelerate hardware innovation. About the Role We’re seeking an experienced Hardware Strategic Sourcing Manager to own sourcing strategy and supplier partnerships for fiber and optical interconnect components across OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. Reporting to the Head of Partnerships & Strategic Sourcing, you will lead sourcing across fiber cable assemblies, internal optical harnesses, fiber shuffles, optical backplane assemblies, connectorized and standalone passive optical assemblies, fiber-array units (FAUs), fiber-to-chip and coupling interfaces, detachable connectors, optical routing, and assigned optical packaging, assembly, and test services. You will work closely with electrical engineering, optical engineering, systems engineering, mechanical and packaging engineering, quality, rack integration, data-center deployment,manufacturing, supply chain, finance, legal, and program management teams to translate demanding bandwidth, signal integrity, reliability, and scale requirements into resilient supplier partnerships and scalable commercial strategies. Your work will directly support the performance, reliability, manufacturability, and scale of the high-speed optical connectivity required for OpenAI’s next-generation AI systems. In this role, you will: Develop and execute a comprehensive sourcing strategy for fiber and optical interconnect components supporting high-bandwidth AI systems and infrastructure. Own sourcing across optical fiber cable assembli

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for a high-performing strategic finance professional to join our growing GTM Finance team. Our business grows with our customers' usage, which makes the finance function highly strategic at Baseten: growth, pricing, margin, and capacity decisions are business model decisions. You'll sit at the center of them, partnering directly with GTM leadership and reporting into a finance team with a seat at the table for the calls that shape the company's trajectory. This role is ideal for someone with 3 to 7 years of experience across strategic finance, investing, and/or investment banking who wants broad exposure to company-building inside a fast-scaling AI infrastructure company. Experience at a usage-based software company is a plus. RESPONSIBILITIES Own financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting processes for the GTM org Build and maintain financial models across revenue, S&M spend, headcount, and strategic bets Analyze the metrics that define a usage-based business – ARR, gross margin, consumption trends, retention, and GTM efficiency Partner with GTM leaders to set targets, evaluate growth initiatives, shape pricing, and design sales compensation Help prepare board materials, investor updates, and fundraising analyses Improve financial reporting, dashboards, and operational rigor so our infrastructure scales as fast as our revenue Work cross-functionally to turn ambiguous business questions int

About the Team The Strategic Futures team is a small, research- and writing-focused group exploring how advanced AI could reshape public policy, institutions, and society over the long term. We operate like an internal think tank: developing clear views of desirable long-range outcomes, examining the choices that could make those outcomes more likely, and producing ideas that help OpenAI and the broader public navigate profound technological change. The team is intentionally lean and highly collaborative. Our work draws from public policy, law, economics, political science, history, institutional design, technology, and other relevant disciplines. We partner closely with experts across OpenAI to connect long-range thinking with evolving AI capabilities, organizational priorities, and real-world policy questions. About the Role We are looking for a highly organized and strategic operator to serve as Chief of Staff and Program Manager for the Strategic Futures team. Working closely with the team’s leader, you will translate broad priorities into coordinated execution, establish the systems and operating rhythms that keep a small team performing at a high level, and ensure important work moves forward with clarity and consistency. This is a hands-on role combining chief-of-staff partnership, program management, strategic planning, cross-functional coordination, and communications. You will make it easier for the team to focus on high-quality research and writing by ensuring priorities are clear, decisions are documented, dependencies are visible, collaborators are engaged, and follow-through is reliable. You will also serve as a central connector between Strategic Futures and teams across OpenAI, helping the group build trusted relationships, navigate organizational complexity, and contribute effectively to broader company priorities. In this role, you will: Partner closely with the leader of Strategic Futures to translate the team’s strategic direction into clear prio

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. ROLE We’re looking for a high-performing strategic finance professional to join our growing GTM Finance team. Our business grows with our customers' usage, which makes the finance function highly strategic at Baseten: growth, pricing, margin, and capacity decisions are business model decisions. You'll sit at the center of them, partnering directly with GTM leadership and reporting into a finance team with a seat at the table for the calls that shape the company's trajectory. This role is ideal for someone with 3 to 7 years of experience across strategic finance, investing, and/or investment banking who wants broad exposure to company-building inside a fast-scaling AI infrastructure company. Experience at a usage-based software company is a plus. RESPONSIBILITIES Own financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting processes for the GTM org Build and maintain financial models across revenue, S&M spend, headcount, and strategic bets Analyze the metrics that define a usage-based business – ARR, gross margin, consumption trends, retention, and GTM efficiency Partner with GTM leaders to set targets, evaluate growth initiatives, shape pricing, and design sales compensation Help prepare board materials, investor updates, and fundraising analyses Improve financial reporting, dashboards, and operational rigor so our infrastructure scales as fast as our revenue Work cross-functionally to turn ambiguous business questions into

About the Team Industrial Compute is building the infrastructure ecosystem that enables OpenAI to train and deploy increasingly capable AI systems at unprecedented scale. The organization operates across compute supply, demand, infrastructure, partnerships, and the physical and commercial systems required to make large-scale compute available. Industrial Compute Strategy & Operations serves as the connective operating layer across this ecosystem. The team works directly with senior leadership across Scaling, Finance, Partnerships, Research, and Infrastructure to translate ambiguous, high-impact challenges into clear strategies, scalable operating mechanisms, and decisive execution. This team is responsible for ensuring that OpenAI’s compute strategy evolves into durable competitive advantage by identifying systemic constraints, aligning stakeholders around critical decisions, and driving the operating mechanisms required to execute at scale. About the Role We are seeking a highly experienced Strategic Operations leader to help shape and operationalize OpenAI’s compute strategy across supply, demand, infrastructure, partnerships, and commercial strategy. This is a senior individual contributor role operating at the intersection of strategy, operations, infrastructure, and executive decision-making. You will work closely with compute leadership to identify the most consequential problems facing the organization, develop structured approaches to solving them, align stakeholders across the company, and drive initiatives from ambiguous concepts through execution. The role will span both strategic and operational work. You may develop long-range compute strategies and investment frameworks, evaluate build-versus-buy decisions, shape major commercial transactions, establish organizational planning mechanisms, or take ownership of a cross-functional initiative that does not have a clear organizational home. Success in this role requires exceptional judgment, analytical

About the Team Like every team at OpenAI, the Marketing team contributes to our broader mission of ensuring responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. With that aim in mind, we are responsible for developing and executing strategies that drive awareness, engagement, and usage for OpenAI’s products and platform amongst our core audiences. Our focus extends beyond just promoting product features; we aim to provide valuable insights and resources that help our users make the most out of AI technologies. The Marketing Insights & Analytics team aims to understand the markets, audiences, behaviors, attitudes and needs to shape outreach strategies and inform product and business decisions. We’re the strategic partner that discovers insights, specifically: foundational understanding, marketing strategy, thought leadership, measurement and tracking. About the Role You will be the Market Research Lead that translates insights into actionable marketing plans and executions, drive business results, and orient the team towards strategic thinking to drive brand outcomes. This is critical as we hope to reach millions of users and businesses worldwide. This role can be based in San Francisco, CA or NYC, NY utilizing a hybrid work model (3 days per week in-office). In this role, you will: Play an integral part of Marketing and be a strategic partner to brand, product marketing, creative, product and beyond. Design, execute, and deliver high-impact research using mixed methods. Work on a diverse portfolio of business challenges - how do we reach the next billion people, how do we grow internationally, how do we position our suite of products, and how do we ship joy to our customers. Translate business questions into research plans. Translate data into clear, compelling narratives. Develop deep empathy for developers, builders, and technical decision-makers, understanding their workflows, motivations, and pain points across the lifecycle Shape go-to-market str