# Tech Lead, Deployment & Operations — Custom Infrastructure

**Company**: OpenAI
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: Full time
**Salary**: $342K – $445K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124605186

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7b05d54f-c4ef-4677-bb05-f69288f585d8?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_6765a95b-3a7

## 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.

## Skills

### Required
- hardware deployment
- data center operations
- rack-scale systems
- silicon bring-up
- systems validation
- fleet operations
- reliability engineering
- infrastructure automation
- hardware/software integration

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7b05d54f-c4ef-4677-bb05-f69288f585d8?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)