Job Description
About the Team
The Industrial Compute team is responsible for building and scaling the infrastructure foundation that powers OpenAI’s research and products. The team works across compute strategy, infrastructure planning, hardware partnerships, and capacity management to ensure OpenAI can meet rapidly growing training and inference demands with resilient, efficient, and future-looking infrastructure systems.
About the Role
As the Head of Compute Strategy & Ecosystem Management, you will lead long-term compute acquisition strategy and ecosystem management across OpenAI’s rapidly scaling infrastructure footprint. You will drive strategic planning for compute acquisition, capacity forecasting, and infrastructure deployment, balancing evolving workload requirements across training, inference, and research against supply constraints, cost efficiency, and speed to capacity.
You will also manage the broader ecosystem of data center partners, hardware vendors, cloud providers, and infrastructure suppliers, ensuring OpenAI maintains strong strategic relationships and resilient infrastructure capabilities as we scale.
We’re looking for people who combine deep infrastructure and business strategy expertise with strong operational judgment, executive communication, and cross-functional leadership. This role is highly cross-functional and requires close partnership with engineering, finance, operations, and executive leadership teams.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Develop and execute OpenAI’s long-term compute acquisition and infrastructure capacity strategy across training, inference, and research workloads.
Lead strategic ecosystem management across data center partners, hardware vendors, cloud providers, and infrastructure suppliers.
Drive infrastructure planning, capacity forecasting, and deployment strategy to ensure scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient compute availability.
Partner closely with engineering, finance, operations, and executive leadership to align infrastructure investments with evolving technical and business priorities.
Evaluate supply, market, and technology trends to inform infrastructure strategy, vendor engagement, and long-range planning decisions.
Build frameworks and operational processes that improve infrastructure planning, deployment velocity, and ecosystem coordination at scale.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have deep experience in infrastructure strategy, compute capacity planning, cloud infrastructure, data centers, or large-scale technical ecosystem management.
Bring strong cross-functional leadership and are comfortable operating across technical, operational, financial, and executive stakeholder groups.
Have experience managing strategic partnerships and negotiations with cloud providers, hardware vendors, infrastructure suppliers, or large-scale technology partners.
Are highly analytical and able to balance technical requirements, operational constraints, cost efficiency, and long-term strategic priorities.
Thrive in fast-moving environments with significant ambiguity and rapidly evolving infrastructure demands.
Have strong executive communication skills and can translate complex infrastructure considerations into clear strategic recommendations.
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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