Description
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.
Responsibilities:
- 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, operational readiness, and sustained fleet support
- Partner closely with silicon, systems, software, infrastructure, networking, data center, supply chain, and external partner teams to ensure successful deployment at scale
- Define deployment processes, operational playbooks, technical readiness criteria, escalation paths, and reliability practices for new hardware platforms
- Drive cross-functional execution across lab bring-up, rack/system integration, data center deployment, fleet monitoring, debugging, and issue resolution
- Stay hands-on technically through architecture reviews, deployment planning, failure analysis, operational debugging, and critical system-level decision-making
- Identify gaps in tooling, observability, automation, validation coverage, and operational processes, and build plans to close them
- Establish clear metrics for deployment readiness, reliability, performance, maintainability, and operational health
- Build a strong engineering culture grounded in ownership, technical rigor, operational excellence, and high-velocity execution
- Ensure OpenAI's custom hardware platforms can be deployed and operated reliably, repeatably, and safely at scale
- Be a contributor and technical driver for the architecture and design of future ML systems
Requirements:
- 8+ years of engineering experience in hardware systems, infrastructure, data center deployment, production operations, systems engineering, silicon bring-up, or related technical domains
- Strong technical depth in one or more of: hardware deployment, data center operations, rack-scale systems, silicon bring-up, systems validation, fleet operations, reliability engineering, infrastructure automation, or hardware/software integration
- Experience bringing complex hardware systems from development or validation into production environments
- Experience working closely with silicon, systems, software, infrastructure, networking, or data center teams
- Experience with deployment planning, operational readiness, incident response, debugging, and root-cause analysis for production systems
- Experience building tooling, automation, observability, or operational processes that improve deployment quality and fleet reliability
- Demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and lead senior technical talent
- Ability to move fluidly between people leadership, technical strategy, and hands-on operational problem solving
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in high-urgency, cross-functional technical environments
- Experience working in fast-moving environments
To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.