Compensation Operations Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. This long-term undertaking brings together the world’s leading scientists, engineers, and business professionals to develop and deploy transformative AI technologies.

Our Go-To-Market (GTM) organization helps customers understand, adopt, and scale OpenAI’s products and platform. Revenue Operations partners closely with Sales, Finance, and People teams to drive planning, performance management, and operational excellence across the business. The Planning team leads key revenue planning cycles and helps align resources, incentives, and execution against company priorities.

About the Role

We are seeking a Compensation Operations Lead to build and scale the operational infrastructure supporting OpenAI’s global variable compensation programs across Sales, Technical Success, Partnerships, and other GTM teams.

This role owns the systems, processes, administration, and execution of compensation operations—including plan administration, compensation tooling, payout cycles, governance, and field support. Partnering closely with Revenue Operations, Finance, Total Rewards, HRIS, and GTM Systems, you will ensure compensation programs are accurate, scalable, compliant, and trusted by the field.

The ideal candidate combines deep compensation operations expertise with strong systems thinking, operational rigor, and a customer-service mindset.

You'll be responsible for:

Compensation Operations

• Administer compensation plans, quotas, credits, adjustments, exceptions, and payout processes.

• Manage compensation workflows, approvals, and annual planning cycles.

• Support compensation launches, plan changes, and operational readiness across GTM teams.

• Design scalable processes that ensure accurate and efficient compensation administration.

Systems & Tooling

• Own compensation systems and integrations, including configuration, testing, release management, vendor relationships, and enhancement prioritization.

• Partner with GTM Systems, Finance Systems, and HRIS teams on architecture, implementation, and process improvements.

• Ensure data quality and operational readiness across compensation workflows.

Governance, Reporting & Payouts

• Lead recurring compensation payout cycles, reconciliations, and operational close processes.

• Own compensation letter generation, distribution, tracking, and record management.

• Partner with Legal, HR, and Finance on governance, approvals, compliance, and audit requirements.

• Develop reporting, dashboards, and quality assurance processes to improve visibility and accuracy.

Field Support & Enablement

• Serve as the primary escalation point for compensation-related field questions.

• Build scalable support resources, FAQs, documentation, and intake processes.

• Partner with Enablement and Sales Leadership to improve understanding, adoption, and trust in compensation programs.

We're looking for someone with:

• 8+ years of experience in compensation operations, sales operations, revenue operations, finance operations, or related operational roles.

• Deep experience administering variable compensation programs at scale.

• Strong experience with compensation systems and operational tooling.

• Experience managing payout cycles, quota workflows, plan administration, and compensation governance.

• Demonstrated ability to build scalable operational processes in high-growth environments.

• Strong cross-functional stakeholder management and communication skills.

• Strong analytical, systems, and problem-solving capabilities.

• Comfortable balancing strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

Nice to Have

• Experience standing up or scaling compensation operations during periods of rapid growth.

• Familiarity with consumption-based or hybrid revenue models.

• Experience implementing or administering compensation management platforms.

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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