Senior Manager, Customs and Trade

About the Team Tax and Trade at OpenAI shapes business strategy by embedding critical tax, export controls, customs, and cross-border considerations into how the company builds, sources, scales, and operates in support of the mission. We combine deep expertise with practical systems thinking to look around corners, identify emerging risks and opportunities early, and help teams make smarter decisions at the point where strategy becomes execution. Across procurement, hardware operations, manufacturing, logistics, finance, legal, supplier onboarding, and operator workflows, we build robust, scalable support services leveraging cutting edge technology including governed AI and automation to make complex regulated work more durable, more efficient, and easier to scale.

About the Role We’re hiring a Sr. Manager, Customs and Trade Operations to lead OpenAI’s global import customs strategy and operating model. This is a senior role with broad scope across hardware sourcing, development-stage materials, supplier onboarding, landed-cost design, broker strategy, and cross-border execution.

You will refine how OpenAI governs import classification, customs valuation, country of origin, importer structure, broker operating models, documentation standards, and shipment decisioning in a way that supports the company’s pace of technical development and global operations. You will also shape how OpenAI applies AI and agentic workflows to policy-heavy import work, building systems that make complex rules easier to navigate, easier to execute, and easier to scale. This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Refine the strategy and operating model for OpenAI’s import customs program, embedding customs, tariff, and cross-border considerations into sourcing, development-stage materials, supplier operations, and logistics. - Own governance for HTS classification, customs valuation, and country of origin, including decision quality, substantiation, supplier data requirements, broker handoff standards, escalation paths, and reusable knowledge.

• Partner with Engineering, Procurement and Strategic Finance to build durable landed-cost, tariff-impact, and importer-structure decision models that support global sourcing and planning. - Lead broker strategy and operating standards across customs brokers, freight forwarders, and trade-advisory partners, including performance management, escalation management, and execution quality. - Build and scale import documentation, recordkeeping, and supplier-onboarding requirements for customs-critical data, including commercial invoices, packing lists, broker packets, entry support, prototype claims, and audit-ready files.
• Partner with technical and operations teams to support compliant cross-border movement of development-stage materials and related operational workflows. - Establish customs-related policies, SOPs, training, metrics, SLAs, and escalation paths that reduce avoidable friction and improve execution quality across the import lifecycle. - Partner with Legal, Tax, and Business on origin analysis, tariff monitoring, trade controversy, importer setup, and new market entry.
• Build internal tooling and AI-enabled workflows that improve triage, document review, knowledge retrieval, recurring decision support, operational reporting, and overall program scale. You might thrive in this role if you: - A Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience in international trade operations, trade law, cross-border ecommerce. - Significant experience leading import customs, trade operations, or a closely related function in electronics, semiconductors, robotics, advanced hardware, manufacturing, or other high-technology domains.
• Deep expertise in trade law including import classification, customs valuation, country of origin, prototype and temporary-import frameworks, broker management, and customs documentation controls. - Direct experience supporting hardware development processes, sourcing, supplier onboarding, landed-cost analysis, and cross-border execution in a fast-moving product environment. - Strong judgment and a track record of building and scaling programs in multinational, ambiguous, and rapidly evolving operating environments.
• Experience translating customs and trade requirements into workflows, systems requirements, service levels, operating guidance, and measurable business outcomes. - The ability to work credibly with procurement leaders, hardware engineers, manufacturing partners, brokers, finance stakeholders, legal partners, and operations teams. - Experience managing service providers and cross-functional programs that require speed, discretion, and strong execution.
• Strong writing and communication skills, with the ability to turn complex customs requirements into clear process documentation and practical guidance. - Experience building AI-enabled workflows, internal tools, knowledge systems, or agentic processes for policy-heavy or operational work. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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.

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