Business Affairs Manager

About the Team

OpenAI didn’t begin as a traditional company. It began as an idea: that artificial intelligence could be developed in a way that benefits everyone. As a creative team, our role is to help make sure the work behind that idea is understood, as it leaves the lab and meets the world.

This company works at the frontier of intelligence. Like any frontier, it’s unfinished, constantly shifting, and still being explored. Our job is to stay close to that uncertainty and help shape how this story gets told, in a way that feels grounded and human. We do this through campaigns, launches, films, brand systems, and work that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories yet. This team is for people who want to help shape something from the beginning.

About the Role

OpenAI’s Marketing team is looking for a Business Affairs Manager to support our Hardware team. In this role, you’ll own Business Affairs work streams across highly confidential, high-visibility marketing projects from early concepting through launch and post-launch usage.

You’ll be embedded in the project work, partnering closely with Hardware, Product Marketing, Creative, Production, Legal, Procurement, Security, Comms, and external partners to ensure rights, clearances, contracts, vendor requirements, documentation, and risk decisions are managed end-to-end. This role requires someone who can move fluidly between strategic judgment and hands-on execution: shaping scalable BA processes while also driving the day-to-day details that keep complex projects moving.

You’ll partner with existing BA counterparts to inform and roll out ways of working and serve as the connective tissue between Legal, Procurement, Partnerships, Security, external BA partners, and working teams, helping ensure our marketing work is compliant, well-documented, and built to scale.

In this role, you will:

• Own Business Affairs workstreams for Hardware marketing projects, including confidential product launches, campaigns, films, events, experiential activations, partner moments, and emerging creative.

• Manage BA requirements from project kickoff through delivery, including rights, clearances, contracts, usage terms, vendor requirements, documentation, approvals, and post-launch asset usage.

• Drive the day-to-day execution of project workflows, including clearance trackers, talent and public figure deals, music, locations, third-party IP, product footage, likeness rights, paid media usage, global extensions, and renewal needs.

• Inform and manage BA guardrails for confidential and tented Hardware work, including NDA requirements, need-to-know access, vendor onboarding, secure asset handling, prototype or product restrictions, documentation standards, and access removal.

• Own project-level risk management, identifying issues early, recommending paths forward and escalating when needed.

• Develop BA operating models for Hardware’s confidential and restricted-access projects, including how external agencies, production partners, talent, creators, photographers, and vendors are briefed, contracted, permissioned, and offboarded.

• Manage BA requirements for product-in-market and pre-launch product work, including restrictions around prototype visibility, product claims, unreleased features, photography, footage, demos, and asset distribution.

• Partner with Security and Legal to ensure Hardware marketing projects have the right confidentiality controls in place before external work begins.

• Partner with current BA counterparts to build clear BA guidelines that help the wider Marketing team move at the speed of the business while protecting the brand, managing risk, and ensuring compliance.

• Inform Marketing Operations counterparts on all BA-related tools/systems, rights-management systems, DAMs, content-management workflows, and asset lifecycle governance.

• Have an AI-first mindset finding reliable ways to optimize the function of BA with our tools and scaling them.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 12+ years in Advertising / Marketing / Production Business Affairs roles in a fast-moving environment.

• Experience supporting hardware, consumer technology, product launches or confidential pre-launch work.

• Experience owning Business Affairs workstreams inside complex marketing, creative, production or launch environments.

• Deep experience managing negotiations, contracts, rights, clearances, talent/public figure deals, usage rights, third-party IP, and production-related legal workflows.

• Strong project-management instincts, with the ability to track details, manage dependencies, resolve blockers, and keep cross-functional teams aligned.

• Excellent judgment in fast-moving, highly confidential, and highly scrutinized environments.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity, building new processes from scratch, and balancing speed, quality, confidentiality, and risk mitigation.

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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.