Strategic Sourcing Manager, Memory Storage & CPUs
About the Team
The Hardware Strategic Sourcing & Partnerships organization is responsible for the global supply of compute infrastructure powering OpenAI’s model training and inference. We lead strategy, supplier engagements, commercial architecture, execution, and long-term enablement across advanced systems including custom silicon, accelerators, CPU platforms, networking, memory, power delivery, cooling, and full rack solutions.
We are a small, high-impact team working across engineering, operations, finance, legal, and executive leadership to scale OpenAI’s fleet worldwide.
About the Role
We are seeking a Sr. Strategic Sourcing Manager to own and lead sourcing strategy and global supplier partnerships for the Memory Storage & CPUs category (e.g., power systems, high-speed interconnect, memory subsystems, networking modules, mechanical enclosures, thermal systems, etc.). You will be the single-threaded leader across supplier strategy, selection, negotiations, and commercial/operational execution.
You will be accountable for enabling massive growth, reducing long-term cost curves, securing supply resilience, and aligning supplier technology roadmaps with OpenAI’s future system architecture needs.
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.
Key Responsibilities
1. Own the category end-to-end: strategy, business case, supplier selection, executive alignment, and operational enablement
2. Lead complex commercial negotiations including MSAs, NRE, cost models, open-book pricing, ramp/capacity commitments, and risk-buy frameworks
3. Build and scale a reliable global supply base with redundancy and geopolitical compliance, including mapping and influencing sub-tier suppliers to ensure resilience across the extended supply chain.
4. Translate engineering requirements into actionable sourcing plans with tier-1 manufacturing partners
5. Drive cost...