Hardware Finance Sr. Manager

About the Team OpenAI’s acquisition of io marks our entry into consumer hardware and our ambition to define the next human–computer interface. Success in hardware requires strong financial stewardship across the full product cost stack—from early design and sourcing decisions through manufacturing, logistics, inventory, returns, and warranty. Hardware Finance works across Product, Supply Chain, Operations, Accounting, Systems/Data, and Finance to connect business decisions to product cost, inventory, cash, COGS, and margin. About the Role We are seeking a Hardware Finance Sr. Manager to own an assigned area of hardware COGS and inventory end to end. The initial assignment will depend on business priorities and the successful candidate’s expertise. It may include BOM and product cost, manufacturing variance analysis, inventory planning, logistics, returns and warranty, customer support, or another connected set of hardware-finance responsibilities. This is an individual-contributor role with broad scope. Prior hardware experience and deep, hands-on expertise in at least two relevant domains are required. The person will be expected to operate independently, build reusable processes and analytical workflows, and remain accountable for the analysis, judgment, and recommendations. In this role, you will: - Own an assigned area of hardware COGS and inventory end to end. - Own forecasting, close, and business variance analysis for the assigned scope. - Provide hardware leadership with clear variance explanations, trend analysis, and forward-looking signals that connect business and supplier decisions to inventory, cash, COGS, and margin. - Partner with business teams and Finance Platforms to establish the financial data, systems, and dashboards needed to support analysis. - Ensure data integrity and governance through clear definitions, ownership, validation checks, controls, and review processes. - Improve forecasting, reporting, systems, and finance processes so they remain reliable and can scale as the organization grows. - Build strong cross-functional relationships and identify material risks, opportunities, and tradeoffs early. - Develop practical scenarios and recommendations that help leadership make informed decisions. - Partner across Supply Chain, Operations, Product, Accounting, Systems/Data, and Finance. - Drive alignment without formal authority and communicate complex financial issues clearly to senior stakeholders. - Develop expertise in an adjacent COGS or inventory domain as business priorities evolve. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 8+ years of prior consumer hardware or complex physical-product finance experience. - Deep, hands-on expertise across multiple relevant domains, with demonstrated ownership in at least two. - Demonstrated leadership of ambiguous cross-functional initiatives with material impact. - Strong financial modeling, analytical, communication, and stakeholder-influence skills. - Evidence of building scalable processes, systems, frameworks, or automated workflows. - Ability to identify accounting, control, data, and source implications and engage the right owners. - Ability to lead through influence and improve others’ effectiveness. 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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