About this role.
OpenAI is seeking a senior Facilities Operations Lead to commission, deploy, and operate large-scale AI data center infrastructure. The role bridges facility design and construction with hardware landing, operational readiness, and long-term maintenance. It requires deep expertise in mission-critical data center operations, including liquid-cooled IT systems, CDUs, and manifold design and servicing. The lead will establish repeatable commissioning and downtime processes, oversee reliability and quality control, and develop on-site operations staffing strategy.
Role DNA
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Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
5/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
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Core skills
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Sample interview questions
I establish a structured handoff plan early, with clear acceptance criteria, commissioning scripts, asset documentation, owner training, and escalation paths. I coordinate design, construction, controls, and IT stakeholders to validate each system under normal, degraded, and failure scenarios before accepting it into operations.
I have worked with liquid-cooling infrastructure by focusing on CDU operation, distribution and manifold verification, leak-detection controls, water-quality requirements, flow and pressure monitoring, and maintenance procedures. My approach is to combine vendor specifications with site-specific operating limits and documented incident-response playbooks.
For planned work, I require risk assessment, method-of-procedure review, stakeholder approvals, rollback steps, communication plans, and post-work validation. For unplanned events, I use predefined incident severity levels, immediate stabilization actions, escalation matrices, customer-impact communication, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking.
I would standardize core commissioning, maintenance, monitoring, and incident-management processes while preserving documented site-specific exceptions. I would use operational data such as alarms, repeat failures, mean time to repair, preventive-maintenance completion, and capacity trends to prioritize reliability improvements and feed lessons learned back into future designs.
I create an integrated milestone plan that identifies interdependencies, readiness gates, decision owners, and risks across all workstreams. Frequent concise reviews, transparent issue tracking, and a shared definition of operational readiness help ensure hardware is not deployed before facility systems are proven ready and supportable.
About the Team
OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Infrastructure team is central to this mission, setting the core strategy and implementing the vision. From site selection to deployment to operations, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, and operational domains, interacting with experts and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. We design and operate mission-critical facilities that support cutting-edge AI workloads at scale.
About the Role
We are seeking a Facilities Operations Lead to support the commissioning, deployment, and long-term operation of our next-generation AI data centers. This role bridges the interface between data center construction and hardware landing, ensuring seamless integration of mission-critical infrastructure with hardware deployment timelines. You will define and execute commissioning plans, support infrastructure bring-up, and take ownership of operations and maintenance for cutting-edge, large-scale, AI data centers.
You will collaborate closely with design, construction, and hardware teams to define repeatable processes for new data center builds and lead hands-on operations to uphold the performance and reliability of our deployed infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Define and execute sequences of operations, commissioning steps, and bring-up processes for mission-critical data center facilities.
Interface with the design and hardware teams to define deployment procedures tailored to each data center and hardware configuration.
Oversee installation, commissioning, and operational readiness of large-scale data center campuses.
Manage monitoring, maintenance, and quality control of the data center infrastructure, including high-performance liquid cooling systems.
Develop on-site operations staffing strategy.
Develop and enforce procedures for planed and unplanned downtime and SLAs for critical facility components.
Qualifications
Have 10+ years of experience in large-scale data center facility operations, commissioning, or critical infrastructure engineering.
Are deeply familiar with liquid-cooled IT systems, including CDU and in-rack/in-row manifold design, bring-up, and servicing.
Enjoy defining and improving infrastructure processes at the intersection of construction, hardware, and operations.
Are comfortable owning infrastructure from deployment to long-term maintenance and failure recovery.
Have experience responding to field issues and managing reliability through well-defined operational processes.
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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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