Procurement Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

About the Team
OpenAI's Sourcing and Procurement organization helps the company acquire and scale the products, services, and partnerships needed to advance its mission. As the organization grows, we are looking for a strategic builder-operator to establish an AI-led contracting capability that improves speed, consistency, and execution across the company.
In this role, you will partner with leaders and stakeholders across Procurement, Legal, Finance, Security, Engineering, and business teams to design and oversee the contracting process from intake through negotiation and lifecycle management. You will bring structure to ambiguity, align partners around shared priorities, and build repeatable operating mechanisms, responsible AI-assisted workflows, and a centralized contract lifecycle management (CLM) system of record that enable sourcing coordinators to execute agreements consistently and help the business scale.
About the Role
As a Contract Management Lead, you will build, lead, and continuously improve OpenAI's AI-led contracting help desk-a new capability designed to scale contract drafting, review, negotiation, and lifecycle management without significantly increasing headcount. You will own the service strategy, operating model, delivery oversight, coordinator enablement, workflow design, and performance tracking. Sourcing coordinators will manage day-to-day negotiations and agreement execution; you will ensure they have the tools, playbooks, training, guidance, and escalation support required to deliver timely, consistent, and well-governed outcomes.
This is a builder-operator and service-ownership role for someone who combines strong commercial contracting and legal-language fluency with a product-management mentality. You will be hands-on in building the systems, playbooks, AI-enabled workflows, and reporting that support the contracting desk-not in personally negotiating every agreement. You will use a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform as the central system of record, connect it with procurement tools and contract repositories, and partner with Legal, Procurement, Engineering, sourcing coordinators, and CLM technology partners to pilot, evaluate, and improve emerging AI capabilities. Your work will turn contracting into a trusted, measurable, continuously improving service.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:

• Own the product vision and roadmap for an AI-led contracting help desk, translating user needs into a scalable, measurable service for contract intake, triage, and lifecycle management.
• Build and continuously improve the AI-enabled contracting framework, including agent-assisted drafting, clause and fallback recommendations, negotiation guidance, risk detection, and human-in-the-loop escalation.
• Own the contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform and system of record, including workflows, approved templates and playbooks, metadata, reporting, and integrations with procurement tools and repositories.
• Enable sourcing coordinators to lead day-to-day negotiations and agreement execution through effective training, clear ownership, service levels, and operational support.
• Partner with Legal, Procurement, Engineering, Security, Privacy, and Finance to define approval guardrails, resolve escalations, and deploy AI responsibly.
• Pilot emerging contract lifecycle management and AI capabilities; measure cycle time, automation, quality, coordinator delivery, and stakeholder adoption; and use those insights to improve the service.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring an AI-forward mindset, with experience building or deploying AI-enabled agents, automation, or decision-support workflows and a practical understanding of evaluation, human review, confidentiality, and operational safeguards.
• Think and operate like a product manager: identify user needs, define a roadmap, prioritize workflows, launch pilots, and continuously improve the experience using data and feedback.
• Bring strong commercial contracting and legal-language judgment; a JD, law degree, or comparable legal background is strongly preferred, but exceptional equivalent experience is welcome.
• Have implemented or owned a contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform and can design templates, clause libraries, integrations, reporting, and scalable workflows.
• Can build and run a service model that enables sourcing coordinators, clarifies ownership, tracks delivery, and escalates risk without personally owning every negotiation.
• Build trusted cross-functional partnerships and bring structure, speed, and sound judgment to ambiguous, high-stakes operational problems.

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.
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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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