Technical Director in United States

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. About the role As a foundational FDE manager, you’ll lead FDE through high-stakes, ambiguous customer deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end. You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help OpenAI learn from the field. You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale. Your decisions will influence how OpenAI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be. This role is based in New York City We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. This role also will require travel up to 25%. In this role you will Lead and grow a team of FDE delivering production systems with frontier models Own end-to-end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both OpenAI and our wider developer community Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity You might thrive in this role if you Bring 8+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing FDE or custo

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, operati

About the Team OpenAI’s Finance and Revenue Operations organization builds the commercial infrastructure that enables the business to scale with speed, discipline, and financial integrity. Deal Desk operates as the commercial strategy and governance function at the intersection of Sales, Partnerships, Legal, Technical Revenue, Finance, Order Management, Billing Operations, Product, and GTM Systems. We architect complex enterprise transactions, turn ambiguity into executable decisions, and create the guardrails that let the business move quickly with operational and financial discipline. As OpenAI’s enterprise business grows in scale and complexity, Deal Desk defines how novel commercial motions become durable operating capabilities. We convert precedent-setting deal decisions into repeatable policy, controls, workflows, and systems requirements. About the Role We are hiring a Strategic Deals & Commercial Architecture Lead to lead the structuring and governance of OpenAI’s most complex enterprise transactions. This is a senior individual-contributor leadership role for someone with exceptional enterprise deal judgment, operational rigor, and a builder mindset. You will serve as the commercial architect for high-stakes opportunities, translating ambiguous requirements into coherent deal structures, approval strategies, and executable quote-to-cash plans. Your work will shape more than individual transactions. You will establish decision principles and precedent, clarify tradeoffs, and turn recurring patterns into scalable guidance, controls, systems requirements, and enablement. You will own the commercial decision and governance layer that helps strategic opportunities move decisively while managing downstream risk across contracting, billing, revenue recognition, provisioning, reporting, controls, auditability, and customer experience. The right candidate can move seamlessly between advising on a single high-value transaction and improving the operating model be

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the world’s most exceptional talent under one roof to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our Research Recruiting team plays a critical role in this effort. We are an embedded part of the research organization—working side by side with our research staff to deeply understand evolving priorities, build trust, and strategically shape the future of OpenAI’s talent. About the Role We are looking for a highly strategic recruiter to work closely with the Head of Research Recruiting on a small set of unusually important, high-touch searches and candidate relationships. This role will focus on exceptional talent who does not move through a standard recruiting process: highly visible researchers, technical leaders, operators, and other special-interest candidates where timing, discretion, market intelligence, and tailored engagement matter as much as process execution. This is not a conventional req-based recruiting role. You will help identify where the market is moving, develop intelligence on top talent and competitor activity, translate that intelligence into action, and orchestrate bespoke recruiting strategies for candidates who require a more nuanced path into OpenAI. You should be able to translate these signals and states into clear, actionable advice for leaders and then make it happen. In this role, you will: Partner directly with the Head of Research Recruiting and research leadership team to define priority talent targets and shape bespoke engagement strategies. Build and maintain deep market intelligence across frontier AI, research, engineering, and adjacent talent ecosystems, including competitor movement, candidate motivations, and relationship context. Proactively identify, map, and cultivate exceptional high-profile talent before there is a formal or standard hiring process attached. Translate weak signa

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. This team is central to this mission, setting the core infra strategy and implementing this vision. From site selection to the buildout process, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, strategy, and operations, interacting with teams and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. About the Role We are seeking experienced Data Center Mechanical and Electrical/Power Design Engineers with expertise in designing, operating, and maintaining large-scale data center campuses. The ideal candidate for this role will have extensive background and experience in design and managing critical equipment and facilities, design and operation of MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing) systems, and overseeing operational activities from initial phases of Data Center build through delivery and ongoing maintenance. The ideal candidate will have a strong technical background, operational leadership experience, and a proven ability to collaborate with external vendors on critical infrastructure. This role offers the opportunity to lead transformative data center projects with high visibility and impact. If you are passionate about delivering cutting-edge infrastructure solutions, we encourage you to apply. Key Responsibilities Oversee building and MEP design, operation, and maintenance, including reviewing building and MEP drawings and proposals across all project phases. Lead operational activities for large-scale data center campuses, from early design phases through delivery and daily operation. Operate and maintain critical data center facilities and equipment, ensuring reliability and performance. Collaborate with external vendors to select, procure, and manage critical equipment, such as generators, UPS, chillers, and CDUs. Provide technical expertise on all aspects of data center building, equipment, and

About the Team Safety Systems works to ensure OpenAI’s most capable models can be developed and deployed responsibly. Our work spans evaluations, safeguards, red teaming, deployment decisions, and the systems that help OpenAI understand and reduce risk as models become more capable and widely used. Within Safety Systems, the Trustworthy AI team is growing its safety transparency function: a practice focused on helping external audiences understand OpenAI’s technical safety work with greater clarity, rigor, and continuity. We create and improve the public artifacts that explain how our systems are evaluated for safety, what safeguards we build, what decisions we make, and where uncertainty remains. This work includes system cards, the Deployment Safety Hub, safety-related blogs, public governance documents, and other outputs that communicate technical safety topics to external audiences. It also includes building new ways to make technical safety information easier to understand, navigate, and use—including AI-assisted workflows, data visualizations, and interactive tools that make complex technical work more legible over time. About the Role We are looking for a Safety Transparency Editor to own the editorial quality of key safety transparency artifacts and systems. This is a hands-on role for someone who can write crystal-clear, pitch-perfect explanations of the hardest and highest-stakes technical safety topics that OpenAI tackles, and who can lean into AI to build systems that help the broader organization do this work better. Your core responsibility is to shape and execute how our technical safety work is externally communicated: identifying the narrative thread, exercising judgment about which details matter, determining where additional context, explanation, or supporting evidence is needed, translating complexity without sacrificing precision, and helping external audiences understand both the safety measures we’ve taken and the uncertainties that remain. To

About the Team The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. About the Role You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, dist

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Infrastructure team is central to this mission, setting the core strategy and implementing the vision. From site selection to deployment to operations, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, and operational domains, interacting with experts and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. We design and operate mission-critical facilities that support cutting-edge AI workloads at scale. About the Role We are seeking a Facilities Operations Lead to support the commissioning, deployment, and long-term operation of our next-generation AI data centers. This role bridges the interface between data center construction and hardware landing, ensuring seamless integration of mission-critical infrastructure with hardware deployment timelines. You will define and execute commissioning plans, support infrastructure bring-up, and take ownership of operations and maintenance for cutting-edge, large-scale, AI data centers. You will collaborate closely with design, construction, and hardware teams to define repeatable processes for new data center builds and lead hands-on operations to uphold the performance and reliability of our deployed infrastructure. Key Responsibilities Define and execute sequences of operations, commissioning steps, and bring-up processes for mission-critical data center facilities. Interface with the design and hardware teams to define deployment procedures tailored to each data center and hardware configuration. Oversee installation, commissioning, and operational readiness of large-scale data center campuses. Manage monitoring, maintenance, and quality control of the data center infrastructure, including high-performance liquid cooling systems. Develop on-site operations staffing strategy. Develop and enforce procedures for planed and unplanned downtime and SLAs for critical

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale. You’ll work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and legal teams to embed privacy-by-design into our data and access layers. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation. What You’ll Do Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections. Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes. Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable. Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs. Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default. Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations. Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization. You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have 5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production. Strong software engineering fundamentals , with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java). Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines. Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications. Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering. A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs. Nice to Have Experience wi

About the Team The Intelligence and Investigations team seeks to rapidly detect and disrupt abuse in AI technologies to ensure their safe use. We are dedicated to identifying emerging abuse trends, analyzing risks, and working with our internal partners to implement effective mitigation strategies to protect against misuse. Our efforts contribute to OpenAI's overarching goal of developing AI that benefits all of humanity. About the Role As an Intelligence Systems Engineer, you’ll be focused on advancing our Intelligence & Investigations efforts at OpenAI, ensuring the safe and responsible use of AI across our products and services. We are seeking a self-starter to prototype, develop, and maintain new tools and processes that integrate OpenAI’s models and infrastructure to enable internal teams to make sense of large, open-domain datasets, fight abuse, and inform high-stakes decisions. You will be a crucial technical bridge between our data scientists and subject matter experts and technical teams like Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research by leading the development of innovative tools and processes that bolster goals in scaled collections, investigations, and analysis. The ideal candidate has strong analytical and data skills, with a background in both prototyping and building scalable systems that can swiftly detect emerging threats, process vast amounts of information, and deliver insights to stakeholders. We value professionals with outstanding communication skills, a commitment to continuous learning, and who are dedicated to promoting the responsible use of AI. 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: Prototype, build, and maintain at-scale intelligence systems that detect, triage, and monitor targeted signals from both open-source and internal data Analyze requirements and deliver end-to-end solutions that address

About the team The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications for developers and startups. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to late-stage startups. About the Role We are seeking a technically proficient, business-minded Applied AI Engineer to help push the frontier of advanced AI with our strategic startup customers. You'll work with some of the most exciting AI startups in the world, guiding them through ideation, development, delivery, and scaling to accelerate and maximize the value of what they build on our platform. You will have the opportunity to work on the most novel and creative use cases being built on our API, serving as a critical partner in collecting and delivering high-fidelity product and model feedback internally. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Applied Research, and Product teams, and you will report to the Startups Applied AI Lead. This role is based in our San Francisco or New York offices. 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: Partner closely with strategic startup customers as their technical thought partner to build novel applications on our API, helping them rapidly move from ideation to scale. Provide proactive guidance to maximize business impact and accelerate application development. Experiment and prototype alongside customers, demonstrating practical use cases. Contribute to open-source resources and scale the function by sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing useful resources. Synthesize and deliver valuable feedback to the Product and Research

About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases. About the Role : We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude. In this role you will: Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems) Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability Thrive in fast-paced environments with high

About the Team We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role OpenAI is looking for an experienced Performance Engineer to help us scale the performance, reliability, and efficiency of our systems. In this role, you'll apply deep technical expertise to optimize infrastructure and application-level performance across mission-critical products like ChatGPT and our developer API. You’ll work cross-functionally with teams building core services, training models, and developing real-time user experiences to push our latency, throughput, and cost-efficiency to the next level. We are looking for engineers who thrive in ambiguous environments, value deep systems understanding, and are motivated by delivering measurable impact. This is a highly technical, individual contributor role focused on root-cause analysis, profiling, instrumentation, and architecture-level performance improvements across our stack. In this role, you will: Analyze and optimize performance across application, middleware, runtime, and infrastructure layers—networking, storage, Python runtime, GPU utilization, and beyond. Develop tooling and metrics that provide deep observability into system performance. Collaborate closely with infra, platform, training, and product teams to identify key performance goals and drive systemic improvements. Influence architecture and design decisions to prioritize latency, throughput, and efficiency at scale. Lead investigations into high-impact performance regressions or scalability issues in production. Drive performance testing strategies and help define SLAs/SLOs around latency and throughput for critical systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong tr

The Compute & Infrastructure Strategy team handles strategy and execution of OpenAI’s compute roadmap. This team’s key responsibilities span financial analysis & reporting, capacity planning, commercial and business development, and strategic partnerships. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest impact outcomes. About the Role Compute is central to OpenAI’s roadmap and vision. We are seeking an Associate to support financial and strategic work across our compute and infrastructure portfolio. This is a finance generalist role that includes core FP&A responsibilities as well as investment analysis, commercial decision support, and strategic planning. You will own analyses and workstreams, partner closely with technical and finance teams, and help shape decisions about how OpenAI invests in and manages compute. In this role, you will be given direction on the objective and expected to independently structure the problem, work through incomplete information, and deliver a high-quality analysis and recommendation. In this role, you will: Build and maintain financial models across different elements of compute, including GPUs, CPUs, storage, networking, data centers, and power Support planning, forecasting, budgeting, reporting, and variance analysis across compute and infrastructure Perform investment analysis and evaluate commercial decisions and strategic initiatives Prepare high-quality analyses, recommendations, and Exec and Board-facing presentations Support business partners across compute infrastructure, FP&A, and strategic finance Help improve the team’s processes, tools, and ways of working, and identify opportunities for OpenAI to continue leading in compute You might thrive in this role if you have: 3+ years of experience across private/growth equity, investment banking, or strategic finance, or 3+ years in a finance operating role at a high-growth technology company Background in infrastructure, data

About the team The AI Deployment Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. As an AI Deployment Engineer (ADE) in the OpenAI for Government team, you’ll help government agencies transform their organization through solutions such as automated content generation, contextual search, and novel applications that make use of our newest, most exciting models and technology. About the Role We are looking for a driven solutions leader with a product mindset to partner with our public sector customers and ensure they achieve tangible value with GenAI. You will pair with government agencies (federal, state, and local), policymakers, and other public institutions to establish a GenAI strategy and identify the highest value applications. You’ll then partner with their technical teams, subject matter experts, systems integrators, and implementation partners to move from prototype through production. You’ll take a holistic view of their needs and design an architecture using the OpenAI API and other services to maximize customer value. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Global Affairs, Applied Research, and Product teams. This role is based in Washington, DC. We offer relocation support to new employees. In this role, you will: Deeply embed with our most sophisticated public sector customers as the technical lead, serving as their technical thought partner to ideate and build novel applications on our API and other OpenAI products. Work with senior customer stakeholders to identify the best applications of AI in their industry and to build/qualify a comprehensive backlog to support their AI roadmap. Intervene directly to accelerate customer time to value through building hands-on pr