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OpenAI's Special Situations team builds and grows new businesses, capabilities, and strategic partnerships for the company. This team focuses on opportunities with meaningful upside where the offering, commercial model, partnership structure, or delivery approach still needs to be developed.
As a Deal Lead, you will develop and execute some of OpenAI's most consequential commercial opportunities. You'll identify where OpenAI's capabilities can create meaningful value, shape what the company offers and how it brings offerings to market, structure and negotiate partnerships, and drive work from initial thesis through launch and growth.
Key responsibilities include:
- Identifying and developing high-value opportunities across industries and markets, translating customer needs into concrete AI use cases and commercial opportunities.
- Shaping new offerings and business models: defining target customers, value propositions, pricing strategies, and go-to-market approaches.
- Originating and growing customer and partner relationships, building executive alignment around opportunities and desired outcomes.
- Working with field deployment engineers, researchers, product, and GTM teams to prioritize use cases, define scope, success criteria, and delivery approaches.
- Structuring and negotiating complex partnerships with non-standard commercial arrangements including revenue sharing, royalties, and outcome-based pricing.
- Driving executive-level decisions on strategy, economics, resourcing, and risk while maintaining alignment across internal teams and external partners.
- Delivering commercial outcomes post-signature, including launch, adoption, revenue generation, and expansion.
- Building repeatable offerings and partnerships, either continuing to lead strategic relationships or establishing clear ownership as they scale.
You'll work closely with Product, Research, GTM, Finance, Legal, and delivery teams to connect customer needs, technical capabilities, and viable economics. This is a hands-on role requiring both strategic thinking and execution.
Qualifications and Requirements:
- Significant experience in business development, partnerships, corporate development, private equity, or founding roles where you personally led complex commercial opportunities from concept through execution.
- Demonstrated track record of originating, structuring, and closing significant deals, with accountability for post-signature outcomes.
- Ability to transform ambiguous opportunities into clear commercial theses, prioritized use cases, viable economics, and executable plans.
- Strong commercial and financial judgment, including experience designing pricing models, evaluating business models, and negotiating terms that align incentives.
- Ability to learn unfamiliar industries quickly with relevant domain expertise and understanding of how sophisticated customers buy, partner, and deploy technology.
- Effectiveness working with field deployment engineers, researchers, engineers, and product teams to connect technical capabilities with customer value and realistic delivery commitments.
- Skill in building executive alignment across organizations, communicating opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs clearly, and driving decisions when priorities differ.
- Comfort with both strategic shaping and hands-on execution: customer discovery, financial modeling, proposals, negotiations, and resolving execution blockers.
- Ability to create structure and accountability across cross-functional teams without formal authority.
- Sound judgment under uncertainty, adapting as evidence changes and recognizing when to invest more, change course, or walk away.
