Head of SaaS Enablement & Governance

About the Team

SaaS Enablement & Governance (SEG) sits within IT and owns the end to end SaaS and software lifecycle across the company, with a clear mandate to deliver strong governance without creating friction for the business. The team partners closely with Security, GRC, Procurement, Finance, Legal, and Engineering to ensure software is selected, approved, provisioned, and operated with clear standards for security, compliance, cost discipline, and operational clarity.

We focus on portfolio optimization and standardization. We build paved paths for approved tools and enable easy discovery and reuse so teams can onboard quickly without defaulting to net new applications. The team serves as a governance center of excellence, defining standards and controls, governing integrations end to end, embedding security and compliance gates by design, and monitoring for use case drift so tools remain correctly configured, appropriately used, and centrally administered over time. The goal is a curated, well governed SaaS ecosystem that scales with the company.

About the Role

We are seeking a Head of SEG to build and scale the company's SaaS operating model. You will set strategy and execution across portfolio optimization, intake and approval, onboarding, enablement, and lifecycle governance, with clear ownership from adoption through decommissioning.

You will design a reuse first model that makes the right path the easiest path. This includes building clear paved paths, capability to solution mapping, and streamlined intake workflows that help teams move quickly while adhering to governance standards. At the same time, you will establish strong controls including centralized administration, SSO enforcement, integration governance, and ongoing monitoring.

You will create mechanisms to support healthy use case growth and expansion, while identifying and correcting unintended use or configuration drift that introduces risk without proper oversight. This includes building scalable workflows, telemetry, and lifecycle controls that keep systems secure, compliant, and audit ready as the company grows.

This role is ideal for a senior leader who combines SaaS operations depth with strong governance judgment and a bias toward enablement in fast moving environments.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and requires in-office presence.

In this role, you will:

Set direction and establish strong foundations

• Own the enterprise SaaS governance mandate as the company scales in size, regulatory exposure, and architectural complexity

• Define the enterprise SaaS portfolio strategy to drive disciplined growth, reuse, and risk reduction

• Establish clear standards for data handling, access control, and lifecycle ownership across the SaaS ecosystem
  

Build, operate, and scale reliably

• Bring operating discipline to SaaS lifecycle management, including intake, expansion, renewals, and decommissioning

• Establish trusted visibility into SaaS portfolio composition, TCO, ownership, and risk posture

• Ensure governance maturity aligns with audit, regulatory, and security expectations
  

Automate for leverage and safety

• Replace manual, exception driven governance with scalable, policy encoded operating mechanisms

• Ensure governance standards remain enforced as adoption scales and use cases expand

• Deliver executive level transparency into portfolio risk, utilization, and cost trends
  

Enable reuse at scale

• Ensure approved platforms are adopted quickly and consistently

• Reduce net new tool proliferation through strong enablement and clear portfolio standards

• Support controlled use case expansion without introducing unmanaged risk
  

Partner and lead through influence

• Align Security, Finance, Legal, Engineering, and Procurement around a single SaaS governance model

• Navigate tradeoffs between speed, cost, and risk with sound judgment

• Act as the accountable leader for enterprise SaaS governance outcomes with material financial and security impact
  

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 10 or more years of experience leading enterprise SaaS governance, portfolio management, or software lifecycle operations at scale

• Have built governance operating models that measurably improve security posture, audit readiness, and cost discipline without slowing teams down

• Can influence senior cross functional partners to make high judgment tradeoffs across speed, risk, and spend without direct authority
  

Nice to have

• Experience leading enterprise SaaS governance and portfolio strategy in high growth or regulated environments

• Demonstrated impact reducing SaaS spend and security exposure through portfolio leverage and renewal discipline

• Experience building intake and approval systems that encode policy and increase enterprise transparency

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $257K - $327K