Strategy and Operations Lead, Creative Partnerships

About the Team The Creative Partnerships function builds trusted relationships with influential people, brands and institutions across entertainment, sports, fashion, music, media, publishing, and the creator economy. Working closely with Product, Marketing, Communications, Legal, Policy, Safety, Finance, Procurement, and other teams across OpenAI, the function creates responsible, culturally resonant programs that help people understand and use AI. About the Role Creative Partnerships moves quickly across a wide range of priorities, and this role will sit close to both the leadership and the work. We’re looking for a highly strategic, analytical, and collaborative Strategy and Operations Lead to partner with the Creative Partnerships leadership team. You will translate complex priorities into clear decisions, plans, and operating rhythms. You’ll help leadership determine where the team should focus, connect its ambitions to the resources and investments required to deliver them, and ensure decisions turn into coordinated action. You will maintain a clear view of the team’s priorities, portfolio, budget, headcount, partnerships, and organizational needs. You’ll work closely with Creative, Production, Brand Marketing, Resource Management, Strategic Finance, Procurement, Recruiting, People, Legal, and external partners to surface tradeoffs, resolve constraints, and keep important work moving. This role is for someone who enjoys operating close to the work. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model with in-office collaboration Monday through Wednesday and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Serve as a strategic and operational partner to the Creative Partnerships leadership team, helping translate priorities into clear plans, decisions, and follow-through. - Design and run the team’s core operating rhythms, including planning cycles, business reviews, leadership meetings, decision forums, offsites, and cross-functional communications. - Maintain a clear and trusted view of the team’s active and upcoming work, organizational commitments, dependencies, capacity, and risks. - Help leadership prioritize opportunities against Creative Partnerships’ goals, evaluate competing requests, and determine where to invest, reduce, defer, or redirect resources. - Lead annual and half-year planning, goal setting, roadmap development, and progress reviews, connecting strategic priorities to the people, budget, and operating support required to deliver them. - Own the leadership process for headcount, organizational planning, and resource requests. - Partner with Resource Management and Production to anticipate staffing and capacity needs, evaluate internal and external options, and identify delivery risks early. - Establish the team’s partnership with Finance and program owners to maintain visibility into allocations, forecasts, commitments, actuals, and material risks. - Develop scenarios and analyses that clarify the costs, expected value, resource requirements, and operational implications of proposed programs and partnerships. - Lead strategic and cross-functional initiatives that help Creative Partnerships scale, including operating-model design, portfolio management, role clarity, partner strategy, and new programs built from zero to one. - Organize working teams around complex priorities by establishing owners, decision rights, milestones, dependencies, and effective working rhythms. - Create concise executive communications, recommendations, decision memos, and operating materials that help leaders understand complex issues and align quickly. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring 10+ years of experience in Strategy and Operations, Business Operations, Chief of Staff, management consulting, or a related strategic operating role in a fast-moving organization. - Have served as a trusted partner to senior leaders, helping them set priorities, evaluate tradeoffs, communicate decisions, and maintain organizational alignment. - Have experience building planning processes, leadership cadences, portfolio systems, and operating models from zero to one. - Can translate ambiguous or incomplete inputs into structured recommendations, practical plans, and clear ownership. - Have led complex cross-functional initiatives from initial definition through implementation and sustained operations. - Bring strong financial and analytical fluency, including experience with budgets, forecasts, investment scenarios, resource allocation, and organizational planning. - Can distill complex information into concise, executive-ready narratives. - Can build trust across creative, operational, financial, and business teams and influence decisions without relying on formal authority. - Understand the people, partners, budgets, and production considerations behind ambitious creative work without needing to be the person setting the creative vision. - Bring an AI-native builder mindset and look for practical ways to make planning, reporting, decision-making, and coordination simpler and more useful. 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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