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Head of First Party Chip Finance

OpenAI· Strategic Finance
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Hybrid (San Francisco)Full-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Finance leader for OpenAI’s custom silicon efforts, partnering with chip design, engineering, supply chain, and finance to turn technical roadmaps into sound investment decisions and financially disciplined execution across the full chip development lifecycle.

Responsibilities

  • Lead financial evaluation of custom silicon programs, including development investment, production economics, deployment assumptions, and expected returns. Assess first-party chips against alternative compute options.
  • Build and own program-level models and multiyear forecasts that connect engineering milestones, development spending, manufacturing volumes, supplier commitments, and cash requirements.
  • Partner with chip-design and engineering leaders on technical decisions that affect performance, power, cost, and time to deployment. Translate complex design tradeoffs into clear financial recommendations.
  • Develop a detailed view of chip and system costs, including wafers, manufacturing yields, packaging, memory, testing, and integration. Identify opportunities to improve economics as programs move from development into production.
  • Partner with Supply Chain and Procurement on supplier strategy and commercial negotiations, including capacity reservations, volume commitments, prepayments, and contractual risk.
  • Work with Treasury, Corporate Finance, Accounting, Tax, and Legal to evaluate financing and payment structures, manage financial exposure, and support program execution.
  • Support commercial deployment and pricing decisions through analysis of unit economics, total cost of ownership, and the relationship between technical performance and economic value.
  • Establish budgets, reporting, and financial controls that give engineering and finance leaders timely visibility into spending, commitments, milestones, and emerging risks. Build a small, high-performing team while remaining directly involved in the analysis.

Qualifications

  • Prior experience leading finance for semiconductor or custom silicon programs. Direct ownership of investment analysis, program budgets, and financial decisions across chip development and production.
  • An undergraduate degree in electrical engineering or computer science (MBA or equivalent business experience preferred).
  • 10+ years of experience across semiconductor finance, hardware finance, strategic finance, or related fields with substantial responsibility for complex technical programs.
  • Strong command of semiconductor economics, including development costs, manufacturing yields, packaging and memory costs, production ramps, and supplier commitments.
  • Excellent financial modeling skills and the ability to independently build models, test assumptions, quantify uncertainty, and recommend path forward.
  • Technical credibility to work with chip designers and engineering leaders, understand constraints, and evaluate tradeoffs across performance, power, cost, and timing.
  • Experience supporting supplier negotiations, prepayments, and major investment commitments with supply chain and finance teams.
  • Hands-on operating style, clear communication, and judgment to introduce financial discipline while helping technical teams move quickly. Experience using AI to improve analysis and decision-making.
  • Strong track record of hiring, leading, and developing high-performing teams.

Skills

Required:Financial modelingProgram-level forecastingSemiconductor economicsStakeholder collaborationFinancial leadership

Benefits

  • Not specified in the description.
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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