OpenAI is opening a new position: investment banking expert.
The core task is to teach AI to handle investment banking work and define what constitutes "good performance."
The full title of the position is Subject Matter Expert, Investment Banking. It belongs to the Applied AI team and is based in San Francisco.
The salary range is $185,000 to $205,000 (1.25 million - 1.3 million RMB), plus equity. It adopts a hybrid work model with 3 days in-office per week, and new employees are eligible for relocation assistance.
Many people feel the offered salary is too low, suggesting it should be doubled.
Specific Responsibilities: Defining "Quality Standards" for AI in Investment Banking Work
According to the job description, this position will cover the entire investment banking workflow: company and industry research, financial analysis and modeling, valuation, due diligence, deal execution, and the creation and review of client materials.
Daily work revolves around several key tasks.
Firstly, transforming real investment banking workflows into evaluation tasks. These tasks must incorporate realistic inputs, constraints, deliverables, and success criteria.
Secondly, personally creating banker-level reference work products, including financial models, valuation analyses, due diligence materials, screening outputs, pitch books, committee materials, and deal documents.
Based on this, developing rigorous scoring criteria to assess dimensions such as financial correctness, analytical judgment, source quality, traceability, internal consistency, presentation quality, and practical usability.
The evaluation targets include both individual model outputs and end-to-end Agent workflows. Recurring failure patterns identified need to be converted into actionable feedback for Research, Engineering, and Product teams.
The job description highlights the raison d'être for this role: helping the team distinguish between outputs that "merely seem plausible" and work products that are "accurate, traceable, internally consistent, and suitable for formal professional use."
Finally, collaborating with the product team to identify the highest-value application opportunities for AI in investment banking, prototyping workflows using OpenAI's tools, and engaging with clients, design partners, and domain reviewers to ensure responsible deployment in financial services scenarios.
Who is qualified: Minimum 2 years of investment banking experience, Excel and PPT as core skills
The hard requirement is over 2 years of investment banking experience, which must include hands-on deal execution experience and a proven track record of producing high-quality analysis, financial models, and client materials. The job description specifically notes: competence and judgment are more important than title or seniority.
Candidates need to be familiar with the core workflows of M&A, financing, strategic advisory, or closely related product and industry coverage areas. They must be able to build and review financial analyses in Excel, produce polished PowerPoint materials, and possess a sharp eye for errors, unsupported assumptions, unfounded assertions, inconsistent numbers, and poor presentation.
There is also a particularly distinctive requirement: understanding how the nature of work and level of judgment evolve from junior analyst to director, and being able to identify which stages are suitable for AI automation, which for AI-assisted decision-making, and which must retain human review.
Preferred qualifications include: experience spanning multiple investment banking product lines, industry groups, regions, or deal types, or experience in adjacent fields such as private equity, corporate development, equity research, private credit, leveraged finance, or restructuring. Candidates with experience in evaluation design, quality assurance, benchmarking, data annotation, or prompt design are also considered "exceptionally strong candidates."
This is a pure individual contributor role with no management responsibilities.
The job description paints the picture of an ideal candidate: someone who enjoys hands-on work but can also articulate what constitutes good performance; someone who can fluidly switch between Excel models, presentations, source documents, evaluation criteria, product prototypes, and conversations with researchers or clients.
Team Background: Applied AI Targets Professional Knowledge Work
The Applied AI team posting this position spans Research, Product, Engineering, and Go-to-Market functions. Its work involves translating real professional tasks into product requirements, evaluations, training signals, and reusable customer solutions.
In the team introduction, OpenAI explains why investment banking was chosen as an entry point: it is one of the most demanding environments in knowledge work. Bankers need to synthesize fragmented information, make judgments under pressure, and produce precise, well-founded models, analyses, and client materials.
We care not just about whether a model can generate an answer, but whether it can deliver accurate, defensible work products that an experienced banker can trust and use.
This means that the evaluation tasks, reference work, and scoring criteria produced by this role will ultimately flow into model training and product refinement processes.
Interested banking professionals can view the full details on OpenAI's careers page.
Reference link:[1]https://openai.com/careers/subject-matter-expert-investment-banking-san-francisco/
This article is from the WeChat public account "QbitAI," author: Meng Chen
