{"id":181800,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-data-center-infrastructure-architect","title":"Data Center Infrastructure Architect","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":192,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.849,"repost_share":0.01,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":257000,"max":327000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":327000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Digital Twin","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"MATLAB","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"Simulink","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-31T22:52:22Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-31","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T20:49:32Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":60,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":60},"description":"About the Team\nOpenAI’s Industrial Compute team is building and productizing infrastructure capabilities that help organizations deploy and operate advanced AI systems at scale. The team works across AI hardware, systems engineering, physical infrastructure, and customer delivery to turn emerging technologies into reliable, repeatable infrastructure solutions.\nOur work sits at the intersection of technical strategy, product development, engineering, and deployment. We partner closely with customers and internal engineering teams to solve complex infrastructure challenges spanning compute, power, cooling, controls, and facility efficiency.\nAbout the Role\nWe are seeking a senior, hands-on Data Center Infrastructure Architect to develop and optimize the physical infrastructure required for large-scale AI deployments.\nThis is a broad technical role spanning data center architecture, electrical and mechanical systems, high-density compute, controls, telemetry, and digital modeling. You will use simulation, operational data, and digital-twin approaches to evaluate infrastructure designs, identify system-level constraints, and improve efficiency, reliability, cost, and speed of deployment.\nThe ideal candidate can move fluidly between first-principles analysis, facility and equipment design, computational modeling, engineering review, and real-world implementation. You should be comfortable working across disciplines rather than operating solely within electrical, mechanical, or software boundaries.\nKey Responsibilities\nDefine system-level architectures for high-density AI data centers across power, cooling, IT equipment, controls, and facility infrastructure.\n\nDevelop digital twins and other computational models that represent the behavior of data center systems under changing workloads, environmental conditions, equipment configurations, and failure scenarios.\n\nUse design and operational data to identify constraints, improve PUE and related efficiency metrics, and optimize capacity, reliability, water consumption, cost, and deployment schedules.\n\nEvaluate tradeoffs across electrical topology, cooling architecture, rack density, redundancy, controls, maintainability, constructability, and operational complexity.\n\nTranslate evolving AI hardware requirements into practical facility, rack, power, and thermal architectures.\n\nEstablish reference architectures, modeling standards, design assumptions, performance requirements, and validation methodologies that can be reused across customer deployments.\n\nPartner with software, data, controls, hardware, mechanical, electrical, construction, commissioning, and operations teams to connect digital models with real infrastructure behavior.\n\nIntegrate telemetry from systems such as BMS, EPMS, DCIM, SCADA, equipment controllers, and IT hardware into modeling and optimization workflows.\n\nLead technical reviews of customer and partner designs, identify material risks, and recommend changes grounded in quantitative analysis.\n\nWork with customers and delivery teams to adapt reference solutions to site-specific constraints while preserving performance, reliability, and efficiency objectives.\n\nSupport pilots, commissioning, performance testing, and post-deployment analysis to validate models and continuously improve infrastructure designs.\n\nHelp shape the technical roadmap for Industrial Compute’s physical-infrastructure products and engineering services.\n\nQualifications\nSignificant experience designing or optimizing hyperscale data centers, large mission-critical facilities, or comparable infrastructure systems.\n\nBroad knowledge of data center electrical and mechanical systems, including power distribution, backup power, thermal management, liquid cooling, heat rejection, controls, and monitoring.\n\nExperience making system-level design decisions across multiple engineering disciplines.\n\nExperience developing or applying simulation, optimization, digital-twin, or physics-based modeling techniques to physical infrastructure.\n\nStrong understanding of data center efficiency and performance metrics, including PUE, WUE, utilization, capacity, reliability, and total cost of ownership.\n\nExperience working with operational telemetry and translating real-world system behavior into design improvements.\n\nAbility to evaluate complex tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, cost, schedule, scalability, sustainability, and maintainability.\n\nDemonstrated ability to lead technical work in ambiguous, rapidly changing environments.\n\nStrong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex engineering decisions to customers, executives, and cross-functional teams.\n\nBachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, systems engineering, applied physics, or a related technical discipline.\n\nPreferred Skills\nExperience with high-density GPU clusters and direct-to-chip liquid cooling.\n\nExperience connecting facility models with workload, rack, server, or chip-level power and thermal behavior.\n\nFamiliarity with modeling or engineering tools such as Modelica, MATLAB/Simulink, Python, EnergyPlus, computational fluid dynamics tools, or equivalent platforms.\n\nExperience with BMS, EPMS, DCIM, SCADA, PLCs, data historians, or industrial controls.\n\nExperience developing reference designs or new infrastructure architectures within a hyperscaler, data center operator, advanced engineering organization, or major design consultancy.\n\nExperience taking an infrastructure concept from modeling and prototype validation through deployment and operational feedback.\n\nAdvanced degree in an engineering or scientific discipline.\n\nSuccess in the First Year\nEstablish a credible system-level model of power, cooling, compute, and facility behavior for priority Industrial Compute use cases.\n\nIdentify and validate meaningful opportunities to improve efficiency, capacity, reliability, or deployment cost.\n\nDeliver reusable reference architectures and engineering methodologies for customer deployments.\n\nCreate a repeatable feedback loop connecting modeling, operational telemetry, commissioning results, and future design decisions.\n\nBecome a trusted technical partner to internal engineering teams, customers, and infrastructure delivery partners.\n\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. 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