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Hardware Tools Engineer in San Francisco

184 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current hardware tools engineer jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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Relocation support. Relocation assistance is stated. This does not establish visa sponsorship.
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI's rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable infrastructure in high-stakes environments. 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: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems. Demonstrate excellent software enginee

AWSRestMachine LearningAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds systems that turn advances in model inference and optimization into reliable production capabilities. We enable OpenAI workloads to be qualified and optimized across new accelerator platforms without requiring a one-off port and tuning effort for every hardware target. Our work spans distributed systems, model execution, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, secure partner integrations, evaluation systems, and developer tooling. We build the infrastructure that makes optimization workflows automated, reproducible, and trustworthy. About the Role We are seeking a software engineer to help build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. You will develop both OpenAI-hosted services and secure partner-side software for running long-lived optimization workflows. These workflows generate candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes; compile and execute them on target hardware; verify their correctness; measure their performance; and use the results to guide further optimization. You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems. A central part of the role is turning research prototypes and one-off hardware bring-up efforts into reliable, reusable infrastructure with clear contracts, reproducible results, strong observability, and well-defined security boundaries. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability. Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware. Integrate model workloads, hardware profiles, compiler toolchains, runtimes, serving engines, and distributed-exe

PythonAWSLinuxRest
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Relocation support. Relocation assistance is stated. This does not establish visa sponsorship.
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI’s Infrastructure organization builds and evaluates the systems that power advanced AI workloads. We work closely with hardware, modeling, and architecture teams to ensure that new platforms deliver real-world performance aligned with workload needs. Our team focuses on understanding workload behavior across evolving hardware platforms—bridging the gap between theoretical capability and observed system performance. About the Role We are seeking a Workload Porting & Performance Engineer to evaluate new hardware platforms by porting benchmarks and real-world workloads, analyzing performance, and identifying system bottlenecks. In this role, you will bring up workloads on new systems, characterize performance behavior, and adapt workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. You will play a critical role in validating new platforms and ensuring that performance aligns with expectations across compute, memory, and networking subsystems. This role requires strong hands-on experience with performance analysis, workload optimization, and system-level debugging across hardware and software boundaries. 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. Key Responsibilities Port and enable benchmarks and real-world workloads on new hardware platforms. Evaluate system performance across compute, memory, storage, and networking subsystems. Identify and analyze performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Adapt and optimize workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. Develop and run performance experiments and profiling workflows. Compare expected vs. observed performance and provide feedback to: hardware architecture teams performance modeling teams system and software engineers. Debug issues across the stack, including software, runtime, and hardware interactions. Provide actionable insights to guide platform readiness and deployment decisions. Qualifications E

AWSRestAIRust
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. Our team works across silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the novel platforms required to support them. We partner closely with research to bring advanced AI capabilities into the physical world. About the Role As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference, you will design, develop, and ship the OS stack that makes advanced AI capabilities reliable, responsive, and energy efficient on consumer devices. Your work will span OS services and frameworks, inference runtime integration, model fitting, scheduling, and performance and power management. You’ll partner with research to adapt models to device constraints, make design decisions across the stack, and carry solutions from early exploration through integration and production. In this role, you will: Build the inference platform: Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management. Fit models to device constraints: Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior. Coordinate system resources: Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device act

Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceAIC++
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. Our team works across systems software and product engineering to build reliable consumer devices and the platforms behind them. We develop the connectivity and networking foundations that support communication across OpenAI products and systems. About the Role As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on connectivity and networking, you will design, develop, and maintain the OS capabilities that enable reliable, secure, and efficient communication across OpenAI products and systems. Your work will span Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frameworks, IP networking, and advanced network services and policy. You’ll develop OS services, libraries, and interfaces for a broad range of connectivity needs, make design decisions across software boundaries, and carry solutions through development, integration, and production. In this role, you will: Build connectivity foundations: Design, implement, and maintain OS services, frameworks, and APIs for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and IP networking. Develop reusable network capabilities: Build connection management, network configuration and selection, service discovery, and routing capabilities. Enable secure communication: Develop network services and policies for secure communication, traffic management, and isolation across varied network environments. Resolve issues across the stack: Investigate correctness, concurrency, interoper

Artificial IntelligenceAIC++
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware,

AWSKubernetesLinuxRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -85.4%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma, and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to ship AI products. ABOUT THE ROLE This role owns Baseten's relationships and market intelligence across the hardware and chip layer of the compute stack: NVIDIA directly and key OEM partners such as Dell, Lenovo, Pegatron, and Supermicro. As Baseten's compute strategy increasingly depends on hardware access and terms, this role is central to keeping Baseten ahead of the market. WHAT YOU'LL DO Build and maintain relationships across NVIDIA and key OEM partners (e.g. Dell, Supermicro) Track market intelligence on hardware availability, roadmaps, and terms to keep Baseten informed and strategically well-positioned Support deal structuring and negotiation in partnership with Baseten's deal-making function Work closely with Infrastructure and Hardware Platform engineering teams to ensure consistent, high-quality provider relationships and engineering partnerships Represent Baseten credibly across senior relationships in the hardware ecosystem, escalating to company leadership when strategically valuable WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Existing relationships and credibility within the NVIDIA, OEM, and HPC ecosystem Strong relationship-management instincts, with the judgment to know when to bring in senior leadership for maximum impact Comfort operating in a fast-moving, high-stakes market where hardware access can be a major competitive differentiator Collaborative style — this role depends on close coordination with engineering counterparts, not just ex

Machine LearningAIGoHR
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -88%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization builds and operates the infrastructure required to train and serve frontier AI models. The Capacity Planning team connects rapidly changing research and product demand with the compute, networking, storage, power, data center, hardware, and operational resources required to make that demand executable. About the Role We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to build and lead capacity planning across OpenAI's large-scale AI infrastructure. You will translate uncertain workload demand into clear infrastructure requirements, allocation decisions, supply commitments, activation priorities, and long-range capacity strategies. This role sits at the intersection of research, engineering, infrastructure, finance, sourcing, deployment, and operations. You will create the planning models, operating cadences, governance mechanisms, and source-of-truth systems that allow teams to understand what capacity is required, what is available, what is at risk, and what decisions must be made. This is not a finance-only forecasting or reporting role. Success requires technical fluency across the infrastructure stack, strong analytical judgment, and the ability to move consequential decisions forward when requirements, timelines, and supply conditions change quickly. Key Responsibilities Own capacity-planning processes across near-term workload allocation, quarterly execution, and longer-range infrastructure horizons. Translate research, training, inference, and product demand into compute, accelerator, cluster, networking, storage, rack, power, and site requirements. Develop scenarios that make assumptions, confidence levels, constraints, sensitivities, and decision points explicit. Reconcile requested demand against contracted, delivered, installed, activated, and workload-usable capacity. Partner with research and engineering teams to understand workload priorities, technical dependencies, utilization patterns, and changing req

PythonSQLAWSRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms. The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal and VMs dependable & scalable foundations for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to build and operate the services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in our compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design and implementation through testing, rollout, observability, and operation. Your work will support capabilities such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, secure bootstrap, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries and learn unfamiliar parts of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online - securely, responsibly, and at global scale - underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability. You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives—inc

AWSRestAIGo
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Relocation support. Relocation assistance is stated. This does not establish visa sponsorship.
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. The Systems Integration team is critical in this mission, turning complex hardware-software development into reliable product signals. We validate complete device experiences across software, cloud services, connectivity, accessories, and real-world operating environments, combining hands-on system testing, structured test development, hardware-in-the-loop environments, diagnostics, and automation to uncover issues that component-level testing alone cannot reveal. About the Role As a Systems Test Engineer, End-to-End Validation , you will design and execute end-to-end testing for complex device experiences spanning hardware, software, connectivity, cloud services, and accessories. You’ll translate product behavior and real-world use cases into structured, reproducible test procedures and build test environments that allow failures to be reliably reproduced and diagnosed. You’ll also identify opportunities to automate repetitive or high-value scenarios, working with engineers to turn complex manual workflows into scalable validation systems. Because this is a new category of devices, you’ll have the opportunity to build the end-to-end validation foundation early—shaping test coverage, environments, and workflows from prototype through launch. We’re looking for someone who combines strong systems thinking, hands-on testing skills, technical curiosi

PythonAWSRestAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team Like every team at OpenAI, the Marketing team contributes to our broader mission of ensuring responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence With that aim in mind, we are responsible for developing and executing strategies that drive awareness, engagement, and usage for OpenAI’s products and platform amongst our core audiences. We take a data-driven approach to understand our customers' needs and challenges, ensuring that their voices are reflected in product development and messaging. We then partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design teams to create a cohesive customer experience across all our channels. Our focus extends beyond just promoting product features; we aim to provide valuable insights and resources that help our users make the most out of AI technologies. About the Role As a Product Marketing Manager for Partner Marketing on the Hardware team, you will help shape the partnership strategy for a new product ecosystem and bring that ecosystem to market with the right partners, programs, and commercial motions. This role calls for a strategic, relationship-oriented marketer who can identify high-potential partners, understand their priorities, and turn shared opportunities into durable, high-impact go-to-market plans. You will work closely with Product, Design, Engineering, Integrated Marketing, Sales, Comms, Finance, Legal, and partner-facing teams to define how first-, second-, and third-party partners participate in our hardware ecosystem. You will lead the marketing and commercial aspects of partnerships, support joint launches, and ensure partner needs are understood internally while OpenAI’s product, brand, and customer experience standards are represented externally. This role reports into the VP of Product Marketing, Hardware, and offers a unique opportunity to build the partner marketing foundation for a new category of AI-powered devices. In this role, you will: Help craft and implement th

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. The Systems Integration team is critical in this mission, turning complex hardware-software development into reliable product signals. Lab Operations is the physical backbone of that work: we build and maintain the device fleets, test environments, and hardware-in-the-loop labs that let teams test repeatably, understand failures, and ship with confidence. About the Role As a Lab Operations Manager, Systems Integration , you will own the day-to-day operation of a large-scale consumer device test lab. This is a hands-on operations leadership role: you’ll keep device fleets, test rigs, lab infrastructure, inventory, provisioning, maintenance, and logistics running smoothly so engineers and QA technicians have reliable environments for validation and release testing. We’re looking for someone who is highly organized, technically hands-on, comfortable with consumer electronics and lab equipment, and experienced operating complex physical test environments at scale. Because this is a new category of devices, you’ll have the opportunity to build the lab operating model early—shaping the systems, standards, and workflows that support products from prototype through launch. In this role, you will: Own device fleet and inventory: Manage configuration, deployment, tracking, lifecycle, and accurate asset records for a large fleet of consumer devices and test

Artificial IntelligenceAILogistics
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. The Operating Systems team is critical in this mission, turning sophisticated hardware and AI capabilities into a reliable, trusted platform. Security is central to that work: we define trust boundaries, integrate hardware-backed protections, isolate sensitive context, and establish the guardrails that let AI applications and agents act safely, privately, and under user control. About the Role We’re looking for a Software Security Architect to define the security architecture for OpenAI’s next-generation operating system. You’ll work alongside hardware security architects and partner with operating system, silicon, firmware, privacy, and product teams to protect users, their devices, and their data. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can connect operating system internals, hardware-backed security, and real-world product constraints. Your work will shape the platform’s trust model, protect sensitive information, and set the technical foundations for AI that is safe, private, and under user control. In this role, you will: Define the operating system’s security architecture, trust boundaries, privilege model, and protections for sensitive user data. Partner with hardware security architects to integrate roots of trust, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and processor security capabilities into the operating system. Desig

Artificial IntelligenceAIC++
M
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -100%

We're looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer for Midjourney Medical — from precision electromechanical assemblies up to the large-scale structures and mechanisms that hold everything together and make it move. This role spans the full range of scale: one week you might be refining a compact transducer mount, the next you're architecting a structural frame or designing the motion system that positions hardware within it. This is a hands-on role on a small cross-functional team. You'll take problems from whiteboard sketch to working hardware yourself — designing in CAD, prototyping in the shop, testing, iterating, and integrating with research teams, electrical and software engineers along the way. We move fast and expect you to drive your own work: identifying what needs to happen next, making sound engineering calls without waiting for permission, and shipping hardware that works. What you'll do Own parts of the mechanical systems end to end — structures, mechanisms, and electromechanical integration Design large-scale structures: frames, weldments, enclosures, and support systems, with attention to stiffness, weight, manufacturability, and serviceability Design mechanisms: linkages, motion stages, actuation systems for precise, reliable positioning and articulation Integrate transducers, electronics, cabling, and thermal management into large physical systems Perform engineering analysis (tolerance stack-ups, structural/FEA, mechanism kinematics) to de-risk designs before committing to hardware Build and test relentlessly — 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and hands-on fabrication are core to how you'll validate designs Select parts and materials for system-level integration, balancing performance, cost, and lead time Drive projects independently from concept through validation, and collaborate closely with a small cross-disciplinary team to hit project goals What we're looking for Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related field 5+ years of experien

AIGoExcelSEM
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -88%

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Working alongside leading cloud providers, engineering firms, construction partners, utilities, and equipment manufacturers, we are delivering hyperscale AI campuses that enable the next generation of frontier AI models. The Strategic Sourcing team develops and executes the commercial strategies that ensure our infrastructure programs have reliable access to the equipment, materials, and strategic partners needed to deliver at unprecedented scale. We partner closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Design Engineering, Hardware Operations, Finance, Legal, and our external suppliers to build a resilient global supply network capable of supporting Industrial Compute's long-term growth. As we continue expanding globally, strategic sourcing becomes a critical competitive advantage, ensuring our infrastructure programs remain cost-effective, resilient, and capable of executing against aggressive deployment timelines. About the Role We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Manager, Data Center Infrastructure: Owner Furnished Equipment to lead sourcing strategy for the critical infrastructure systems that power Industrial Compute campuses. This role will develop commercial strategies, negotiate strategic supplier agreements, and manage relationships across engineering, construction, manufacturing, and infrastructure partners responsible for delivering mission-critical facilities. You will work closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Engineering, Finance, Construction, and external suppliers to ensure Industrial Compute has the capacity, supplier relationships, and commercial frameworks required to support rapid global expansion. The ideal candidate has experience sourcing major infrastructure systems for hyperscale data centers, mission-critical facilities, industrial construction, semiconductor manufacturing, energy infrastr

AWSRestAIGo
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