Tech Lead, Finance & Supply Chain Engineering

Details

The Finance & Supply Chain Engineering organization includes two complementary teams. Software Engineering builds internal full-stack applications, durable agentic workflows, plugins, MCPs, and measurable AI-enabled engineering practices. Data Engineering builds trusted analytics data assets for Finance and Supply Chain. The teams have distinct charters, with important shared dependencies and broad cross-team partnerships across Engineering, Applications, Finance, and Supply Chain.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on senior technical leader who will report alongside the Software Engineering and Data Engineering managers. This is an individual-contributor role with no immediate people-management responsibility. The Tech Lead will raise the technical bar across both teams, participate in important cross-team or high-risk design decisions, and directly own and ship high-impact work. The role should improve team judgment and autonomy rather than act as a floating architect or universal approval gate.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the Software Engineering and Data Engineering managers as a peer technical leader; managers retain accountability for people, staffing, priorities, performance, and delivery commitments.
• Directly own the architecture, implementation, launch, and operation of one or more high-impact initiatives, remaining accountable for real outcomes rather than advisory output alone.
• Guide important design decisions that are cross-team, difficult to reverse, or material to security, financial controls, reliability, data quality, or long-term cost of ownership.
• Establish pragmatic engineering standards across architecture, APIs and data contracts, testing, security, reliability, observability, lineage, data quality, and operational ownership.
• Advance engineering standards for building with AI, including agentic workflows, evaluation, telemetry, adoption, and outcome measurement.
• Work across backend, full-stack, data, and big-data systems, making sound boundary decisions and bringing the right domain experts into the design.
• Partner deeply with Engineering, Applications, Product, Finance, Supply Chain, Security, and other stakeholders to translate ambiguous needs into durable technical systems.
• Raise the technical capability of both teams through design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, written guidance, and reusable reference implementations.
• Protect team autonomy: focus involvement on consequential decisions, clarify principles and tradeoffs, and avoid becoming a required approver for routine or reversible work.

Requirements

• Significant professional engineering experience with sustained staff-level or equivalent impact as an individual contributor; prior people management is not required, but a plus.
• Ability to reason across a full-stack application — from user experience and client architecture through backend services, integrations, authorization, and durable state.
• Strong data-engineering judgment across analytical modeling, batch or streaming pipelines, orchestration, lineage, quality, scale, and downstream data contracts.
• Experience designing, building, shipping, and operating consequential systems; able to go from architecture to implementation details without relying on positional authority.
• Track record of leading important technical decisions and cross-team initiatives through influence, clear reasoning, and trusted partnership.
• Commitment to correctness, security, data quality, auditability, operational excellence, and measurable outcomes.
• Clear communication with engineers, managers, and non-technical partners; lead with context and principles rather than control.

Nice to Have

• Experience building internal products, developer platforms, workflow systems, or analytics platforms used across multiple teams.
• Experience with LLM applications, durable agents, AI evaluations, plugins, MCPs, or measurement of AI-enabled engineering outcomes.
• Experience in Finance, Supply Chain, accounting, procurement, ERP, or another domain where controls, reconciliation, and traceability matter.

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.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents) and paid medical/caregiver leave
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple coordinated company office closures
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends, etc.)