Head of Data Center Rack and Cluster

About the Team The Industrial Compute team at OpenAI is responsible for all things compute capacity, from our partnership deals (i.e. stargate) through the delivery and operations of this capacity. The team is a fast-paced, dynamic team working on the cutting edge of capacity at scale, speed, quality, and cost, while enabling the best AI Frontier models and beyond. About the Role This role is responsible for leading the engineering team that defines the rack and system architectures underpinning the compute infrastructure enabling OpenAI’s frontier AI models. The role will oversee the early phases of compute definition from architectural definition through delivery of production-ready racks. We are looking for an experienced engineering leader who understands how to navigate the technical and business tradeoffs required to build the world’s premiere AI infrastructure. Qualified candidates will have extensive hands-on experience in system bring up and a proven ability to bring platforms to a stable state ready for production use through lab and early test and deployment environments. In this role, you will: - Own the reference rack, cluster, and system architecture standards for new OpenAI compute platforms. - Define readiness and acceptance criteria for production-bound systems. - Stay engaged through validation until configurations are proven repeatable and ready for handoff. - Manage relationships with accelerator and equipment vendors to define an overall roadmap - Partner across the industrial compute and partner teams to bring clarity to requirements and ensure smooth delivery of next-gen systems - Manage a team of engineering leads focused on the architectural and engineering work required to define, test and stabilize OpenAI’s future compute platforms. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have hyperscale data center experience (or equivalent) - Have deep experience in rack, system, or network architecture definition - Can effectively leverage performance and TCO modeling and a deep understanding of business risks and requirements to guide complex and often ambiguous system tradeoffs. - Have experience overseeing delivery of complex new hardware platforms and can effectively shepherd systems from first delivery to production-ready state - Can manage vendor relationships to resolve rack and system issues in addition to shepherding vendor roadmaps to support OpenAI’s needs. - Have excellent management and leadership skills. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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 r