Deal Desk Lead, Cloud Marketplaces & Partnerships

OpenAI

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Research Services 👥 201 employees 📍 San Francisco, CA, US Est. 2015

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with…

Job Overview

OpenAI’s Finance and Revenue Operations organization builds the commercial infrastructure that enables the business to scale with speed, discipline, and financial integrity. Deal Desk partners closely with Sales, Partnerships, Legal, Technical Revenue, Finance, Order Management, Billing Operations, Product, and GTM Systems to structure and execute complex enterprise transactions. We help the business move quickly while ensuring commercial agreements are executable, scalable, and supported by strong operational and financial controls.

As OpenAI expands its strategic cloud partnership motions (AWS), Deal Desk will play an important role in establishing the commercial workflows, guardrails, and execution mechanisms needed to support partner-led and marketplace-enabled enterprise transactions.

About the Role

We are hiring a Deal Desk Lead, Cloud Marketplaces & Partnerships — AWS Focus to lead the commercial execution framework for cloud-partner transactions. This role will focus on supporting the AWS and OpenAI partnership, including AWS Marketplace and other partner-led enterprise commercial motions.

This is an individual contributor role for someone who combines strong enterprise deal judgment with operational rigor and a builder mindset. You will Translate complex AWS partner-led transactions into executable commercial structures, approvals, and repeatable Deal Desk processes.

You will not own partner relationship management, pipeline generation, or sales closing. Instead, you will own the Deal Desk execution and governance layer that helps AWS-related opportunities move efficiently without creating unmanaged downstream risk across contracting, billing, revenue recognition, provisioning, reporting, controls, auditability, or customer experience.

The right candidate is comfortable moving between complex individual transactions and broader process improvement. They can assess risk, recommend practical paths forward, align cross-functional stakeholders, and convert recurring transaction patterns into scalable guidance, controls, systems requirements, and enablement.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as the Deal Desk subject matter expert, partnering cross-functionally to structure and execute complex AWS Marketplace and partner-led enterprise transactions


• Establish clear governance and guardrails for partner-led deals, advising on transaction structures and assessing their downstream impact on contracting, billing, and revenue recognition


• Translate emerging commercial requirements into scalable quote-to-cash workflows and systems requirements, identifying friction points to drive process improvements and automation


• Assess the downstream operational and financial impact of proposed deal structures across contracting, billing, revenue recognition, and auditability


• Build repeatable execution mechanisms, including approval matrices, standard operating procedures, and playbooks to strengthen commercial motion


• Support private offer structuring and execution on a day-to-day basis

Required Qualifications

We’re Seeking Someone With:

• Typically 7+ years of individual contributor experience in Deal Desk, Commercial Operations, channel sales, or a related enterprise SaaS/cloud-commercial function


• Expertise in structuring and executing complex, non-standard enterprise transactions and building scalable processes, controls, and playbooks


• Strong command of quote-to-cash (QTC) processes, including the downstream operational and financial impact on contracting, billing, and revenue recognition


• Demonstrated ability to assess risk, recommend clear paths forward, and influence senior cross-functional stakeholders (including Sales, Legal, and Finance) without formal authority


• Hands-on experience with enterprise commercial systems like Salesforce, CPQ, and marketplace tools