Strategy and Operations Lead, Hardware

Job description

About the Team The Marketing team helps OpenAI bring products, research, and company priorities to the world with clarity, creativity, and impact. We partner across Product, Research, Design, Creative, Communications, Finance, Legal, and Go-to-Market teams to translate complex technology into work that people can understand, trust, and use. Marketing Strategy & Operations builds the operating systems that help this work move with focus and speed. We connect priorities to plans, plans to resourcing, and resourcing to execution, so teams can make better decisions earlier and stay aligned as priorities evolve. About the Role We’re looking for a Strategy & Operations Lead, Hardware Marketing to help build and run the operating system for OpenAI’s Hardware Marketing work. This role will partner closely with Hardware Marketing leadership, Product Marketing, Product, Design, Creative, Production, Communications, Finance, Legal, and external partners to bring structure to a fast-moving, highly cross-functional product area. You will help the team clarify priorities, build plans, manage intake, track decisions, surface risks, frame tradeoffs, and keep critical workstreams moving from planning through operating readiness. This is a strong fit for someone who can operate independently in ambiguity, build practical systems from scratch, and move fluidly between strategy and execution. Experience with complex product launches or sensitive, cross-functional product areas is preferred. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Build and run the core operating rhythm for Hardware Marketing, including planning cycles, planning reviews, weekly priorities, decision forums, risk tracking, and leadership-ready updates. - Partner with Hardware Marketing leadership to translate business and product priorities into clear workstreams, owners, milestones, dependencies, and decisions. - Create visibility across planned and reactive work, helping the team understand what is committed, what is net-new, and where tradeoffs or escalation are needed. - Drive intake and prioritization processes that help Hardware Marketing evaluate new requests against current priorities, capacity, budget, and operating readiness. - Partner with Finance and Marketing leaders on planning inputs, visibility, and tradeoff framing. - Partner with Resource Management, Recruiting, Creative, Production, and Program Management to identify role gaps, operating reviews, planning inputs, resourcing needs, and leadership updates. - Prepare and run key operating forums, including operating readiness reviews, executive check-ins, cross-functional planning meetings, and decision follow-through. - Build lightweight tools, templates, trackers, and playbooks that help the Hardware Marketing team move faster with better shared context. - Proactively identify systemic issues across workflows, decision rights, communication paths, and resourcing, then design practical fixes that can scale. - Maintain strong judgment around confidentiality, access, and context-sharing so the right people have the right information at the right time. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 12+ years of experience in strategy and operations, business operations, product operations, marketing operations, program management, or a related operating role. - Have supported complex product areas or launches with many stakeholders, unclear paths, and changing priorities. - Experience with complex product launches or sensitive, cross-functional product areas is preferred. - Can take broad, ambiguous goals and turn them into clear plans, owners, decisions, and operating rhythms. - Are comfortable leading cross-functional work across senior stakeholders, creative teams, product teams, finance, legal, communications, and external partners. - Know how to use trackers, dashboards, written updates, and decision docs as tools for alignment, not as process for process’ sake. - Can zoom out to understand business context and zoom in to chase down the details that make work actually move. - Communicate clearly, directly, and with good judgment, especially when surfacing risks, tradeoffs, or unresolved decisions. - Are energized by building 0-1 systems in a fast-moving environment and improving them as the work changes. - Use AI and automation thoughtfully to reduce manual work, improve visibility, and help teams operate with more leverage. 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