Hardware Systems Planning Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s 1P Hardware Systems team operates at the intersection of Hardware Engineering, Infrastructure, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Deployment, and Finance to translate infrastructure demand into an executable systems plan.

The Planning Lead connects system demand and deployment timing to site and configuration requirements, power availability, XPU needs, hardware supply commitments, manufacturing capacity, and site readiness.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a 1P Hardware Systems Planning Lead to own the integrated demand, supply, and deployment plan for our 1P AI infrastructure systems. This role will connect infrastructure demand and site power availability to system configurations, XPU requirements, and hardware supply commitments—creating a single, actionable view of whether our deployment plan can be met.

You will establish the planning mechanisms that allow teams to see what changed, understand the impact, and act quickly when demand, supply, configuration, site readiness, or power timing moves. You will work across Hardware Engineering, Infrastructure, Supply Chain, Strategic Sourcing, Manufacturing, Deployment, and Finance to identify gaps early and drive recovery plans to closure.

This is a highly cross-functional role for someone who combines systems-level thinking, strong analytical judgment, and rigorous program execution. The ideal candidate can turn complex and changing inputs into a clear operating plan, surface the decisions that matter, and drive accountability across teams without relying on formal authority. Success also requires strong communication judgment: the ability to align cross-functional teams, brief leadership at a concise and decision-oriented level, and go deep into the underlying assumptions, dependencies, risks, and recovery plans when needed.

Responsibilities

• Integrated Planning - Own the integrated planning process for 1P hardware systems, connecting system demand, deployment timing, site and configuration requirements, power availability, XPU needs, and supply commitments.

• Maintain a clear, decision-ready supply plan that shows changes from the prior plan; weekly pull-ins and push-outs; site, deployment, and system-configuration impacts; power availability assumptions and timing; system demand and corresponding XPU requirements; current supplier and manufacturing commitments; gaps between forecast, requirements, and committed supply; and recovery actions with accountable owners and target closure dates.

• Validate that the end-to-end supply plan is executable, including the timing and dependencies across components, XPU availability, system integration, factory capacity, site readiness, and deployment.

• Operating Cadence & Change Management - Lead a weekly deployment and supply review focused on material changes, emerging risks, required decisions, and recovery-plan execution.

• Publish and maintain a weekly delta report that clearly explains what changed, why it changed, and the downstream impact to deployments, sites, configurations, power, and supply.

• Track forecast-versus-commit gaps at a weekly level, identify the underlying constraints, and drive recovery plans with named owners and dates.

• Coordinate the biweekly end-to-end supply picture update for leadership and key stakeholders, including the latest system forecast; how the forecast aligns with site power availability and timing; current supply commitments; weekly gaps to commit; and the plan and timing to close each gap.

• Cross-Functional Execution & Risk Management - Partner with Hardware Engineering and Infrastructure teams to translate roadmap, configuration, and deployment changes into updated system and XPU requirements.

• Work through the Supply Chain team to pressure-test commitments with manufacturing partners and suppliers, understand constraints, and establish credible recovery paths.

• Anticipate supply and deployment risks, develop scenarios and tradeoffs, and provide crisp recommendations to senior leaders.

• Process & Operational Scaling - Build scalable planning models, reporting standards, and operating mechanisms that improve forecast accuracy, change control, traceability, and executive decision-making as 1P infrastructure scales.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience in hardware systems planning, supply planning, program management, operations, or a related role supporting complex, high-volume technology products or infrastructure.

• Strong understanding of the dependencies among hardware demand, component supply, manufacturing capacity, system configurations, site readiness, power availability, and deployment schedules.

• Experience building and managing integrated demand-and-supply plans at weekly granularity, including forecast changes, supply commits, gaps, scenarios, and recovery actions.

• Demonstrated ability to pressure-test whether a plan is executable rather than simply consolidating inputs from different teams.

• Exceptional analytical skills and the ability to translate complex datasets and technical dependencies into clear insights, decisions, and actions.

• Strong program leadership, including experience establishing operating cadences, driving cross-functional accountability, and closing issues across organizations.

• Demonstrated experience communicating effectively across cross-functional teams and with senior leadership, with the judgment to tailor the level of detail to the audience—distilling complex issues into concise, decision-ready updates while going deep on assumptions, dependencies, risks, and recovery plans when needed.

• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, high-ambiguity environment where requirements, priorities, and constraints evolve quickly.

• High ownership, sound judgment, and a bias toward surfacing risks early and driving them through resolution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AI infrastructure, hyperscale data centers, or accelerator systems.

• Experience with semiconductors, server or rack manufacturing, or complex hardware supply chains.

What Success Looks Like

• A single, trusted view of 1P hardware system demand, supply commitments, deployment timing, and associated gaps.

• Clear weekly visibility into changes, pull-ins, push-outs, and their impact on sites, configurations, power, systems, and XPUs.

• Early identification of risks to the deployment plan, with quantified impact and actionable recovery paths.

• Work through SCPM and strategic sourcing to ensure every material gap has a clear recovery plan, accountable owner, target date, and escalation path.

• Forecast, supply, manufacturing, site-readiness, and power assumptions remain aligned across teams.

• Leadership receives a concise, consistent, and decision-oriented biweekly view of the end-to-end supply picture.

• Planning processes and tools scale with the pace, volume, and complexity of OpenAI’s 1P infrastructure roadmap.

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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