Tech Lead, Deployment & Operations — Custom Infrastructure

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.

Qualifications

• 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
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, especially in high-urgency, cross-functional technical environments
• Experience working in fast-moving environments