Technical Program Manager, AI Infrastructure Capacity Planning

Details

OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization builds and operates the infrastructure required to train and serve frontier AI models. The Capacity Planning team connects changing research and product demand with the compute, networking, storage, power, data center, hardware, and operational resources needed to execute that demand.

The Technical Program Manager will build and lead capacity planning across OpenAI's large-scale AI infrastructure. The role translates uncertain workload demand into infrastructure requirements, allocation decisions, supply commitments, activation priorities, and long-range capacity strategies. It sits at the intersection of research, engineering, infrastructure, finance, sourcing, deployment, and operations.

Responsibilities

• Own capacity-planning processes across near-term workload allocation, quarterly execution, and longer-range infrastructure horizons.
• Translate research, training, inference, and product demand into compute, accelerator, cluster, networking, storage, rack, power, and site requirements.
• Develop scenarios that make assumptions, confidence levels, constraints, sensitivities, and decision points explicit.
• Reconcile requested demand against contracted, delivered, installed, activated, and workload-usable capacity.
• Partner with research and engineering teams to understand workload priorities, technical dependencies, utilization patterns, and changing requirements.
• Partner with sourcing, finance, hardware, deployment, and operations teams to align supply commitments, activation schedules, costs, and delivery risks.
• Support allocation and prioritization decisions when infrastructure is constrained or delivery plans change.
• Track infrastructure lead times, critical dependencies, utilization, headroom, forecast accuracy, activation readiness, and capacity risk.
• Build dashboards, analytical tools, executive updates, and operating cadences that create a credible source of truth.
• Drive mitigation plans for site delays, hardware shortages, network or storage constraints, workload changes, and other capacity risks.
• Continuously improve planning models, governance, data quality, and accountability as OpenAI's infrastructure scales.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in technical program management, infrastructure capacity planning, cloud infrastructure, supply planning, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated ownership of capacity planning for large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, AI or ML workloads, or hyperscale infrastructure.
• Ability to translate ambiguous demand into structured assumptions, scenarios, technical resource requirements, and executable plans.
• Technical fluency across compute, networking, storage, data center infrastructure, utilization, reliability, and deployment dependencies.
• Strong analytical skills and experience developing planning models, operational metrics, dashboards, or data-driven decision systems.
• Experience leading decisions across engineering, finance, sourcing, deployment, operations, and executive stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain uncertainty, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly.

Preferred Skills

• Experience planning GPU, accelerator, or AI infrastructure capacity for training or inference workloads.
• Experience with cluster allocation, cloud capacity, hardware supply, infrastructure procurement, site readiness, or production activation.
• Familiarity with forecasting methods, scenario planning, optimization, cost attribution, capacity economics, and utilization management.
• Experience building planning tools or source-of-truth systems using SQL, Python, spreadsheets, BI platforms, or similar technologies.
• Track record of improving utilization, reducing infrastructure cost or risk, and enabling critical workloads during periods of constrained supply.

Location

San Francisco, California. This role requires regular in-person collaboration with infrastructure, research, and operational partners.

Benefits

• Base salary of $257,000–$335,000, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.