Head of First Party Chip Finance

About the Role As Head of First Party Chip Finance, you will be the finance leader for OpenAI’s custom silicon efforts. You will partner with teams across chip design, engineering, infrastructure, supply chain, and finance to turn technical roadmaps into sound investment decisions and financially disciplined execution. This role spans the full chip development lifecycle: evaluating design and roadmap choices, building investment cases, forecasting development and production costs, and supporting manufacturing and deployment at scale. You will give leadership a clear view of program economics, funding requirements, and risks as we build first-party compute capabilities. In this role, you will: - Lead financial evaluation of custom silicon programs, including development investment, production economics, deployment assumptions, and expected returns. Assess first-party chips against alternative compute options. - Build and own program-level models and multiyear forecasts that connect engineering milestones, development spending, manufacturing volumes, supplier commitments, and cash requirements. - Partner closely with chip-design and engineering leaders on technical decisions that affect performance, power consumption, cost, and time to deployment. Translate complex design tradeoffs into clear financial recommendations. - Develop a detailed view of chip and system costs, including wafers, manufacturing yields, packaging, memory, testing, and integration. Identify opportunities to improve economics as programs move from development into production. - Partner with Supply Chain and Procurement on supplier strategy and commercial negotiations, including capacity reservations, volume commitments, prepayments, and contractual risk. - Work with Treasury, Corporate Finance, Accounting, Tax, and Legal to evaluate financing and payment structures, manage financial exposure, and support program execution. - Support commercial deployment and pricing decisions through analysis of unit economics, total cost of ownership, and the relationship between technical performance and economic value. - Establish budgets, reporting, and financial controls that give engineering and finance leaders timely visibility into spending, commitments, milestones, and emerging risks. Build a small, high-performing team while remaining directly involved in the analysis. You might thrive in this role if you have: - Prior experience leading finance for semiconductor or custom silicon programs. You have directly owned investment analysis, program budgets, and financial decisions across chip development and production. - An undergraduate degree in a technical discipline, preferably electrical engineering or computer science. An MBA or equivalent business experience complements your technical foundation. - 10+ years of experience across semiconductor finance, hardware finance, strategic finance, or related fields, with substantial responsibility for complex technical programs. - Strong command of semiconductor economics, including development costs, manufacturing yields, packaging and memory costs, production ramps, and supplier commitments. - Excellent financial modeling skills and the ability to independently build models, test technical and commercial assumptions, quantify uncertainty, and recommend a path forward. - The technical credibility to work closely with chip designers and engineering leaders, understand their constraints, and evaluate tradeoffs across performance, power, cost, and timing. - Experience supporting supplier negotiations, prepayments, and major investment commitments in partnership with supply chain and finance teams. - A hands-on operating style, clear communication, and the judgment to introduce financial discip