Senior Manager, Supplier MDM Operations

About the Team OpenAI’s Procurement team makes working with the world easy, fast, and safe. We connect supplier readiness, purchasing, invoicing, and payment so teams can move with confidence as OpenAI scales. Accounts Payable and Supplier Master Data Operations provide the trusted data, dependable execution, and financial discipline behind that experience. About the Role The Senior Manager, Supplier MDM Operations will own the end-to-end supplier operation that makes data accurate, verified, and ready for purchasing and payment. Reporting to the Supplier MDM Lead, you will set operating priorities, lead delivery, and be accountable for service, data quality, sensitive-change controls, and capacity. You will build an operation that scales across procurement and financial systems while creating protected capacity for the lead’s governance and transformation work. We’re looking for a hands-on senior leader who turns ambiguous problems into clear decisions, develops people, and delivers lasting improvements. You will balance supplier readiness, risk, and capacity; resolve complex escalations; and use practical automation to help teams move faster with reliable data. Location: San Francisco, CA. This role follows a hybrid work model, with three days per week in the office (Monday–Wednesday). Recruiting to confirm relocation and travel requirements. In this role, you will: - Own supplier onboarding and maintenance across identity, legal entities, sites, tax documentation, authorized contacts, payment methods, and banking information; set service standards and take accountability for results. - Set the operating and capacity plan across demand, handling effort, backlog, and coverage. Prioritize work, quantify tradeoffs, and assign qualified owners and backups based on skills, access, confidentiality, and independent verification responsibilities. - Own operational execution of sensitive-change controls, including independent identity and authority verification, documented evidence, qualified employee review, and backup coverage. Maintain segregation of duties across preparation, approval, implementation, invoice processing, and payment approval. - Lead and develop the operating team and eligible service partners through clear goals, coaching, performance management, cross-training, and quality review. Use contractors for surge capacity and match assignments to approved access and scope. - Lead resolution of complex supplier-data and synchronization failures with AP, Procurement Operations, Tax, Treasury, Security, and Finance Systems. Establish the accountable owner, verify the fix across systems, and remove recurring causes. - Direct supplier-data remediation, including hierarchies, entity/site relationships, duplicates, holds, inactivation, and reactivation. Reconcile open obligations and validate downstream effects before changes take effect. - Own the operating scorecard for first-pass readiness, critical-field completeness, queue aging, supplier wait time, rework, control evidence, and change-related payment exceptions. Use trends to set priorities and demonstrate sustained improvement. - Establish an operating cadence and decision framework with the Supplier MDM Lead that protects transformation time, maintains reliable coverage, and turns recurring operational issues into prioritized improvement requirements. - Deliver measured improvements through AI and automation for validation, duplicate detection, queue monitoring, and evidence preparation. Define quality thresholds, access boundaries, human approvals, monitoring, and fallback procedures; count capacity gains after they are demonstrated. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring substantial supplier master data, P2P, or finance operations experience, with a track record of independently leading a complex operation and developing people or managing service delivery at scale. - Apply deep knowledge of supplier identity, legal entities, sites, tax and payment data to improve purchasing and payment outcomes across systems. - Have owned operating controls in an audited environment, including segregation of duties, independent verification, evidence quality, and remediation of control gaps. - Make sound decisions under ambiguity and time pressure, translate business needs into practical options, and resolve escalations across teams with clear accountability. - Have worked deeply with ERP and procurement workflows and can trace data across systems; Oracle and Zip experience is helpful. - Build capacity plans and service measures, coach teams through performance issues, and show sustained improvements in throughput, quality, backlog, and resilience. - Bring practical AI fluency and experience improving workflows with automation, with measurable benefits and authorized human ownership of sensitive decisions. - Influence senior stakeholders and build trust across Procurement, AP, Tax, Treasury, Security, and technology teams through clear recommendations, tradeoffs, and follow-through. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.  We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. 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