---
title: 'Commissioning Project Lead, Data Center Delivery at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/commissioning-project-lead-data-center-delivery-openai-san-francisco-7v56f3fq27kj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Commissioning Project Lead, Data Center Delivery at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $226k–$285k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/91cf75be-a3c6-4f39-9623-f72186fd8553

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI’s Industrial Compute organization is building the infrastructure required to support the next generation of frontier AI systems. Through a combination of strategic partnerships and self-built data center campuses, we are scaling the power, cooling, electrical, mechanical, and controls infrastructure needed to deliver compute at unprecedented scale. The Commissioning organization is responsible for ensuring this infrastructure is safely tested, validated, integrated, and transitioned into reliable operations. For our self-build campuses, the team operates through a hybrid delivery model: OpenAI provides commissioning leadership, discipline ownership, governance, and project integration, while commissioning partners provide field and test engineering capacity to support inspections, startup, testing, and turnover.

## About the Role

We are seeking a Commissioning Project Lead to own the commissioning strategy and execution for a large-scale, self-build data center project. You will lead the overall commissioning program from early construction planning through startup, functional testing, integrated systems testing, and final turnover. You will establish the commissioning execution plan, integrate commissioning activities into the master project schedule, coordinate multidisciplinary readiness, and lead the vendor commissioning partners providing field and test engineering capacity. This role serves as the primary commissioning interface to project leadership, construction management, contractors, equipment vendors, operations, and commissioning partners. You will be responsible for creating clarity across organizations, identifying readiness and schedule risks early, and ensuring the facility progresses through testing and turnover against clearly defined acceptance criteria. The role will initially support planning and coordination in a hybrid capacity and transition to full-time onsite presence as construction, inspections, startup, testing, and turnover become active.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own the project commissioning strategy and execution plan, including scope, governance, acceptance criteria, responsibilities, sequencing, and escalation paths.
- Lead the hybrid OpenAI and commissioning-partner delivery model, establishing clear RACI ownership, staffing requirements, performance expectations, and issue-management processes.
- Integrate commissioning into the master project schedule, including construction readiness, energization, equipment startup, functional testing, integrated systems testing, and turnover milestones.
- Lead commissioning coordination across construction management, contractors, design teams, equipment vendors, operations stakeholders, and field/test engineering teams.
- Drive multidisciplinary commissioning readiness across electrical, mechanical, controls, and supporting infrastructure, identifying dependencies and resolving blockers before they affect testing.
- Own visibility into commissioning risks, including schedule constraints, readiness gaps, design and submittal issues, safety constraints, resource bottlenecks, deficiencies, and documentation quality.
- Coordinate QA/QC inspections and test execution with discipline commissioning leads, contractors, equipment vendors, and commissioning partners.
- Review commissioning plans, test procedures, readiness checklists, deficiency logs, test reports, turnover packages, and other commissioning deliverables against established acceptance criteria.
- Provide clear project and executive reporting on commissioning readiness, staffing, test progress, open risks, issue aging, and turnover status.
- Drive final system acceptance, turnover readiness, closeout, and lessons learned to support a reliable transition from construction into operations.

## Qualifications

- 10+ years of experience in commissioning, construction, engineering, technical program management, or project delivery for mission-critical facilities or similarly complex technical infrastructure.
- Demonstrated experience leading multidisciplinary commissioning programs through construction readiness, startup, functional performance testing, integrated systems testing, and turnover.
- Strong working knowledge of electrical and mechanical commissioning workflows, with the ability to coordinate dependencies across power, cooling, controls, and supporting systems.
- Experience integrating commissioning activities into construction schedules, lookaheads, energization plans, equipment startup sequences, and turnover milestones.
- Strong owner, contractor, equipment vendor, and commissioning-agent management skills, including the ability to drive accountability across organizations without direct authority.
- Experience managing commissioning documentation, test procedures, deficiency resolution, issue tracking, acceptance criteria, and quality governance.
- Ability to identify commissioning and operational-readiness risks early and translate technical issues into actionable schedule and project decisions.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience communicating technical readiness, risk, and recovery plans to senior project leadership.
- Owner-side commissioning experience and experience establishing or scaling hybrid owner/vendor commissioning delivery models are strongly preferred.
- Professional credentials such as a PE license, QCxP, CxA, BCxP, CCP, PMP, or other relevant commissioning, engineering, construction, or project management certification are preferred.

Location This role will support one of OpenAI’s self-build data center campuses in the Savannah, Georgia metro area or Abilene, Texas area. The initial planning and ramp period may operate in a hybrid capacity, with the role transitioning to full-time onsite presence as the project enters active construction, startup, testing, and commissioning. Travel to project sites, vendor facilities, and other locations may be required based on project needs.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At 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. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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