Compute Infrastructure Deployment Lead

Details

The Industrial Compute team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s research and products. The team designs for scale, performance, and adaptability—bridging physical and logical layers so frontier workloads run efficiently across a global footprint. Recent work includes enabling large-scale compute systems, building foundational network infrastructure, partnering with engineering to unlock major compute expansions, and working with compute, inference, and storage systems engineering to lower serving cost while improving performance. The team’s mandate spans power, compute, network, manufacturing and assembly, operations, scheduling, orchestration, and the broader ecosystem needed to enable OpenAI’s next generation of systems.

About the Role

You have deep technical experience (infrastructure / systems engineering, TPM, or product) and move comfortably between system detail and program execution. Your charter will be to deliver step-function improvements in cost, capability, capacity, reliability, and time-to-ready across OpenAI’s infrastructure and compute platform. You will turn ambitious goals into tightly scoped plans, run through blockers and drive projects to production—owning all aspects of the stack from strategy, to technical problem definition, to vendor engagement, through to a clean handoff to execution teams. You will collaborate with partners across the org—engineering, capacity planning, research, infra, product, finance, and business development—to produce the technical, operational, and commercial outcomes needed to make these bets real.

Near-term focus may span things such as driving object-storage direction and roll-out; building out our backbone and shipping several interconnect PoPs to run at multi-Tbps scale across the world; and collaborating with our partners to deliver usable FLOPs as fast as possible.

Responsibilities

• Ship cross-stack, highly technical infrastructure programs end-to-end: frame the problem, define requirements, run fast validations, and deliver to production with clear success metrics.
• Own outcomes end-to-end, and move fast to validate approaches while balancing total cost, performance, and operability.
• Maintain precise technical intuition while shipping pragmatic solutions to complex, ambiguous infrastructure problems.
• Manage external vendors and partners and make sound calls on cost, performance, and operability to deliver usable FLOPs faster.
• Operate both in the weeds at a system level to drive decisions: own the plan of record, force clear trade-offs, and move decisively to unblock execution.

Requirements

• Deep technical experience in infrastructure/systems engineering, technical program management (TPM), or product, with a track record of leading ambiguous, cross-functional infrastructure work to tangible outcomes.
• Ability to move between strategy and hands-on work, owning projects end-to-end and making decisions without perfect information.
• Strong problem-solving skills, high bandwidth for context switching, and the ability to prioritize ruthlessly across multiple projects.
• Experience with or exposure to object storage roll-out, backbone/network interconnects and PoP deployments, compute and storage systems, and delivering usable FLOPs at scale.
• Experience managing vendor relationships and making tradeoffs between cost, performance, and operability.
• Familiarity with capacity planning, scheduling, orchestration, and reliability considerations for large-scale compute platforms.
• A humble, outcomes-driven attitude and willingness to learn missing domain knowledge needed to deliver infrastructure systems.

Benefits

• Competitive base pay (range listed below) and equity offers.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave; flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional coordinated office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible; relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) and other benefits detailed during hiring.