Strategy & Operations Lead - Japan

About the Team

The APAC team is responsible for bringing OpenAI’s mission, products, and partnerships to life across one of the company’s most strategically important regions. As we scale our presence across Asia-Pacific, we are building a regional operating model that enables strong local execution, consistent global alignment, and long-term impact across businesses, products, markets, and functions.

About the Role

We are looking for a Strategy & Operations Lead to lead and scale operational excellence across Japan. This leader will translate global strategy into regional execution, ensure operating discipline across markets and functions, and help the business scale with consistency, speed, and rigor.

This person will act as a key bridge between global leadership and regional teams, bringing clarity to priorities, building scalable operating systems, and ensuring the region is set up to deliver against ambitious business goals while keeping the long-term opportunity in mind.

This role is based in Tokyo, Japan and we use a hybrid model of 3 days in office.

In this role, you will:

• Defining and implementing the Japan operating strategy in alignment with APAC & global objectives and regional priorities.

• Driving execution across key markets, ensuring consistency while adapting to local needs, regulations, and market dynamics.

• Partnering with global leadership to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources, and ensure strong execution in-region.

• Establishing KPIs, reporting frameworks, and operating cadences to track performance and inform decision-making.

• Building and optimizing scalable processes across business lines, including consumer, product, partnerships, and other key functions.

• Identifying operational gaps and inefficiencies, and implementing continuous improvement initiatives.

• Supporting market entry strategies and operational readiness for Japan

• Enabling strategic partnerships through strong operational frameworks and close partnership with relevant teams.

• Helping build a strong regional functional leadership team and ensuring the regional operating system runs smoothly and efficiently.

• Collaborating closely across functions to drive accountability and deliver against regional goals.

• Ensuring seamless coordination between global and regional stakeholders.

• Acting as a central point of accountability for operational delivery across Japan.

• Building, leading, and mentoring a high-performing regional operations team.

• Fostering a culture of accountability, inclusion, operational rigor, and continuous learning.

• Developing leadership bench strength across key markets and functions.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Significant experience leading regional or international operations in a fast-scaling, complex business environment.

• Strong strategic and operational judgment, with the ability to translate high-level goals into clear execution plans.

• Experience operating across multiple markets, functions, and business lines, ideally within Japan.

• A track record of building scalable operating systems, processes, metrics, and reporting frameworks.

• Strong cross-functional leadership skills and the ability to influence senior stakeholders across global and regional teams.

• Excellent business judgment, with a bias toward action and strong accountability for outcomes.

• Experience supporting market expansion, operational readiness, and/or regional growth initiatives.

• Strong people leadership skills, including experience building and developing high-performing teams.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity and creating structure in fast-moving environments.

• High integrity, low ego, and a collaborative leadership style.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to bring clarity to complex topics.

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.

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