Compute Infrastructure Strategy Lead

About the Team
The Industrial Compute team builds and operates the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s research and products. We design for scale, performance, and adaptability—bridging physical and logical layers so frontier workloads run efficiently across a global footprint.

In recent months, this team enabled large scale compute systems, built foundational network infrastructure, partnered with engineering to unlock major compute expansions, and worked with compute, inference, and storage systems engineering to materially lower serving cost while improving performance.

Our mandate spans power, compute, network, manufacturing and assembly, operations, scheduling and orchestration, and the broader ecosystem to enable OpenAI’s next generation of systems.

About the Role
Your charter: deliver step-function improvements in cost, capability, capacity, reliability, and time-to-ready across OpenAI’s infrastructure and compute platform. You’ll take on high-leverage initiatives spanning compute, storage, networking, and systems—cut through complexity quickly, pinpoint leverage points, make clear calls, and drive the changes needed to unlock scale. You’ll work fluidly across teams—engineering, capacity planning, research, infra, product, finance, and business development—to align the technical, operational, and commercial pieces needed to make these bets real.

Some workstreams will be strategic and industry-shifting; others will be tactical so we can ship systems sooner than otherwise possible. Near-term focus may include optimizing storage direction and rollout, improving accelerator utilization, advancing interconnect approaches to lower latency and cost, and accelerating site readiness.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role you will:

• Own cross-stack programs end-to-end: define the problem, design the approach, prove it quickly, and carry the result into production.

• Drive rapid clarity on goals, criteria, risks, metrics for complex technical problems without adding heavy process.

• Work closely with engineering, operations, and (when needed) finance, research, product, and external vendors to align decisions and deliver useful infrastructure at massive scale.

• Own outcomes end-to-end, and move fast to validate approaches—using bounded pilots when useful—while balancing total cost, performance, and operability.

• Collaborate with engineering to incubate and execute on the technical decisions that unlock scale.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep technical experience (infrastructure / systems engineering, TPM, or product) and move comfortably between system detail and program execution.

• Have led ambiguous, cross-functional infrastructure work to tangible outcomes without waiting for perfect information.

• Communicate clearly, align partners, and make sound calls on cost, performance, and operability.

• Prefer measured proofs and execution over slideware and enjoy switching between strategy and hands-on work to fully own projects end-end.

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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