Senior Manager, Accounts Payable - Payments

About the Team

OpenAI's Procurement team makes working with the world easy, fast, and safe. We connect supplier readiness, purchasing, invoicing, and payment so teams can move with confidence as OpenAI scales. Accounts Payable provides the trusted data, dependable execution, and financial discipline behind that experience.

About the Role

We're looking for an Accounts Payable Senior Manager to own and scale supplier payment operations. You'll be responsible for accurate, timely payments, strong controls, and dependable service as OpenAI grows. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll review and approve supplier payment runs, oversee work initiated by our BPO teams and AP agents, as well as personally resolve complex exceptions.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own supplier payment operations: Review and approve payment runs for supplier and payment data accuracy, required approvals, and exception resolution. Oversee manual disbursements and payment inquiries within established authority and segregation-of-duties requirements.
• Resolve complex exceptions: Act as the primary escalation point for payment holds, rejected or returned payments, potential duplicates, and close blockers. Work with Treasury, banking partners, Accounting, and AP processing teams to establish the status, resolve the cause, and verify the outcome before retrying or closing an issue.
• Strengthen payment readiness: Partner with Procurement and existing AP teams to resolve invoice, PO, approval, and supplier-data gaps that affect payment. Establish clear owners and follow through on recurring upstream issues.
• Support forecasting and close: Provide reliable payment forecasts and cash-needs inputs to Treasury. Reconcile payment activity and exceptions, including payments after AP close, so Accounting has the evidence it needs for close and cutoff decisions.
• Maintain effective controls: Uphold SOX-aligned approvals, independent supplier bank-detail verification, segregation of duties, and audit-ready documentation. Support internal and external audits and remediate control gaps with the relevant owners.
• Improve systems and processes: Define payment workflow and reporting requirements with Finance Systems and other partners. Test ERP and bank integrations, including host-to-host workflows, and introduce automation or AI with validated outputs, exception handling, and clear accountability.
• Lead BPO delivery and capacity: Set clear SLAs and KPIs, review quality and performance, coach service partners, and maintain documented procedures and backup coverage. Plan for volume spikes and close demands.
• Report performance and risk: Own clear reporting on payment timeliness, exceptions, rejection and return trends, forecast accuracy, service quality, and control issues. Explain priorities and progress to stakeholders and leadership.

Requirements:

• Strategic AP leadership and a hands-on approach to scaling systems and processes, with strong attention to detail.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex indirect AP and supplier-payment operations, including PO and non-PO workflows.
• Experience leading teams or outsourced delivery partners, setting expectations, developing capability, and managing performance.
• Strong payment-control judgment and experience investigating duplicates, bank-detail changes, and payment failures.
• Working depth in AP accounting, reconciliations, accrual inputs, and close coordination.
• Experience translating AP needs into ERP or procurement-system improvements with measurable results.
• Clear communication and the ability to influence partners and senior stakeholders in ambiguous situations.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with Oracle Fusion, Zip, or comparable integrated finance systems, and practical use of AI in controlled finance workflows.

What We Offer:

• Competitive salary: $216K - $240K per year
• Hybrid work model: 3 days in the office (Mon-Wed) per week
• Relocation assistance to new employees