Credit and Collections Lead

About the Team OpenAI Finance ensures the organization is positioned for long-term success as we pursue our mission. The Order to Cash (OTC) team oversees the complete flow of commercial transactions from order intake and provisioning through billing, collections, and cash application — ensuring accuracy, compliance, and operational excellence in support of OpenAI’s mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. About the Role We are seeking an experienced Credit & Collections Lead to help scale OpenAI’s global accounts receivable, credit risk, and collections operations as our commercial business and customer base continue to grow. In this role, you will own the strategy and execution framework for customer credit reviews, collections performance, receivables recovery, and complex AR escalations. You will help OpenAI extend credit responsibly, improve cash-flow predictability, reduce aging and bad-debt exposure, and maintain a high-quality customer experience across a diverse and rapidly evolving customer portfolio. This role will have a strong AI, automation, and process-transformation mandate. You will help define how AI and modern tooling can improve risk identification, account prioritization, customer outreach, dispute resolution, reporting, and exception management. You will partner closely with Finance Systems, Product, Engineering, and operational teams to translate these opportunities into scalable workflows that reduce manual effort while maintaining strong judgment, controls, and customer experience. You will also work closely with Billing Operations, Cash Application, Sales, Deal Desk, Customer Success, Legal, Accounting, and other cross-functional partners to resolve complex issues and strengthen the end-to-end receivables lifecycle. This is an opportunity to help build a more intelligent, automated, and scalable credit and collections operating model at OpenAI. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Set the strategic direction for OpenAI’s credit and collections function, including portfolio management, aging reviews, cash forecasting, collections prioritization, and customer-risk monitoring. - Own and continuously improve the credit-risk framework for new and existing customers, including credit reviews, risk assessments, credit limits, payment terms, exception management, and escalation criteria. - Drive collections performance across OpenAI’s global receivables portfolio, with a focus on improving cash collections, reducing aging, optimizing DSO, and minimizing bad-debt exposure. - Lead resolution of complex and high-value customer escalations, including overdue balances, billing disputes, payment delays, payment plans, service-suspension decisions, and other material receivables matters. - Define and execute the AI and automation roadmap for credit and collections, including intelligent account prioritization, risk detection, customer-outreach support, dispute routing, reporting, and exception management. - Partner with Finance Systems, Product, Engineering, and internal tooling teams to design and operationalize workflows that improve efficiency, accuracy, and decision quality. - Partner closely with Onboarding, Sales, Deal Desk, Legal, Accounting, Billing Operations, and Cash Application teams to coordinate customer onboarding, resolve issues, support risk-informed commercial decisions, and oversee AR case queue administration tasks including queue hygiene, triage, assignment, SLA monitoring, and escalation routing. - Develop and refine credit and collections policies, playbooks, approval frameworks, escalation paths, SOPs, and internal controls, with automation embedded by design. - Support reserve and write-off recommendations, month-end close, audit requests, and control testing to ensure receivables processes are accurate, well documented, and audit-ready. - Develop reporting and operating routines that provide visibility into AR aging, DSO, cash collections, credit-risk exposure, disputes, unapplied cash, reserves, write-offs, and automation coverage while driving accountability across internal teams and external partners. You might thrive in this role if you have: - 10+ years of experience in credit, collections, accounts receivable, or broader Order to Cash operations, with a track record of improving performance in a complex, high-growth environment. - Strong understanding of commercial credit risk, collections strategy, AR aging, DSO management, reserves, write-offs, dispute resolution, and cash application processes. - Experience developing or refining credit policies, payment-term guidelines, escalation frameworks, and approval processes for new and existing customers. - Demonstrated ability to manage complex and high-value customer escalations while balancing financial risk, commercial priorit