Tech Lead – Deployment & Operations - Custom Infrastructure

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

About the Role

We are seeking a Technical Lead to lead deployment and operations for OpenAI’s Silicon & Systems team. This person will become the Directly-Responsible Individual responsible for bringing OpenAI’s custom silicon and associated systems into data center environments, ensuring successful deployment, bring-up, validation, operational readiness, and ongoing reliability at scale.

This role sits at the intersection of silicon, systems, infrastructure, data center operations, and software. You will lead a team focused on taking new hardware platforms from lab validation into production data center deployment. You will be responsible for building the operational processes, technical workflows, tooling, and cross-functional alignment required to deploy and operate custom AI hardware reliably in OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure.

The ideal candidate is both a strong leader and a deeply technical operator. You should be comfortable staying close to the technical details of hardware bring-up, fleet deployment, debugging, system validation, data center integration, and production operations. This role requires strong execution, excellent cross-functional judgment, and the ability to drive clarity in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.

In this role, you will:

• Lead a team responsible for deployment and operations of OpenAI’s custom silicon and systems in data center environments

• Own the path from hardware bring-up and validation through production deployment, operational readiness, and sustained fleet support

• Partner closely with silicon, systems, software, infrastructure, networking, data center, supply chain, and external partner teams to ensure successful deployment at scale

• Define deployment processes, operational playbooks, technical readiness criteria, escalation paths, and reliability practices for new hardware platforms

• Drive cross-functional execution across lab bring-up, rack/system integration, data center deployment, fleet monitoring, debugging, and issue resolution

• Stay hands-on technically through architecture reviews, deployment planning, failure analysis, operational debugging, and critical system-level decision-making

• Identify gaps in tooling, observability, automation, validation coverage, and operational processes, and build plans to close them

• Establish clear metrics for deployment readiness, reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational health

• Build a strong engineering culture grounded in ownership, technical rigor, operational excellence, and high-velocity execution

• Ensure OpenAI’s custom hardware platforms can be deployed and operated reliably, repeatably, and safely at scale

• Be a contributor and technical driver for the architecture and design of future ML systems

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Enjoy mentoring and developing engineers while staying deeply engaged in technical execution

• Are excited by the challenge of bringing new custom hardware platforms into real-world production data center environments

• Can operate across silicon, systems, software, infrastructure, and data center operations

• Are comfortable leading through ambiguity, especially when the hardware, tooling, and operational model are still being built

• Have strong judgment around deployment sequencing, technical risk, operational readiness, and when to escalate

• Communicate clearly across technical and operational teams, and can align stakeholders through complex deployment and production issues

• Care deeply about building practical systems, tools, and processes that work reliably at scale

• Have a bias toward ownership and are comfortable jumping into urgent technical issues when needed

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience in hardware systems, infrastructure, data center deployment, production operations, systems engineering, silicon bring-up, or related technical domains

• Strong technical depth in one or more of: hardware deployment, data center operations, rack-scale systems, silicon bring-up, systems validation, fleet operations, reliability engineering, infrastructure automation, or hardware/software integration

• Experience bringing complex hardware systems from development or validation into production environments

• Experience working closely with silicon, systems, software, infrastructure, networking, or data center teams

• Experience with deployment planning, operational readiness, incident response, debugging, and root-cause analysis for production systems

• Experience building tooling, automation, observability, or operational processes that improve deployment quality and fleet reliability

• Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and lead senior technical talent

• Ability to move fluidly between people leadership, technical strategy, and hands-on operational problem solving

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in high-urgency, cross-functional technical environments

• Experience working in fast-moving environments

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

Compensation Range: $342K - $445K USD

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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