Data Center Design Manager

About the Team

OpenAI's Compute organization builds and operates the infrastructure that powers frontier AI training and inference. Our data center engineering teams develop the technical standards and infrastructure required to deploy compute at unprecedented scale across both self-built and partner-operated environments.

We work across civil, structural, mechanical, electrical, construction, and infrastructure delivery to develop data center designs that are reliable, scalable, and optimized for speed.

About the Role

We are seeking a Data Center Design Manager to coordinate the design and delivery of infrastructure for large-scale AI deployments.

You will bring engineering disciplines and external design partners together to translate infrastructure requirements into coordinated, buildable design packages. You will manage design milestones, resolve cross-discipline interfaces, and keep technical decisions aligned with project requirements.

Working with engineering, construction, commissioning, operations, and hardware teams, you will help preserve design intent from early planning through construction and turnover. The focus is design execution, technical coordination, and clear ownership of design decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage design scope, deliverables, milestones, and dependencies from concept development through detailed design and construction support.

• Coordinate civil, structural, architectural, mechanical, electrical, controls, and physical network interfaces across data center buildings and campuses.

• Translate owner and hardware requirements into coordinated design criteria, working with discipline leads to resolve gaps and competing requirements.

• Lead multidisciplinary design reviews; track comments, decisions, technical risks, and actions through resolution before design release.

• Evaluate design changes with engineering and delivery partners, making impacts on reliability, safety, cost, schedule, and maintainability clear.

• Coordinate external architects, engineering consultants, developers, and equipment suppliers to maintain design quality and meet agreed deliverables.

• Partner with construction and commissioning teams on constructability, sequencing, RFIs, submittals, field issues, and design changes.

• Maintain design documentation and handoff requirements, and incorporate field and operational lessons into reusable standards and reference designs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, architecture, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

• Experience managing multidisciplinary design for data centers, mission-critical facilities, or comparable complex infrastructure.

• Technical understanding of data center infrastructure and the interfaces among power, cooling, controls, structures, and physical networks.

• Experience taking coordinated design packages from early planning through detailed design and construction support.

• Experience coordinating external design consultants, engineering specialists, and construction partners.

• Ability to read technical drawings and specifications, identify interface gaps, and work with discipline experts to resolve them.

• Strong written and verbal communication, disciplined issue tracking, and sound judgment when balancing technical requirements with delivery constraints.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with hyperscale data centers, high-density AI or HPC infrastructure, or other rapidly evolving mission-critical environments.

• Familiarity with liquid cooling, high-density power distribution, and the integration of changing compute hardware requirements into facility designs.

• Experience managing design reviews, quality checks, and technical change control across concurrent projects.

• Experience with modular or prefabricated infrastructure and design approaches that improve constructability and deployment speed.

• Familiarity with BIM, model coordination, clash detection, and engineering document-control tools.

• Experience supporting commissioning readiness, as-built documentation, and handoff to operations.

• Experience adapting reference designs and engineering standards to site-specific constraints across a portfolio.

• Professional engineering or architecture licensure, or relevant design and project management credentials.

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.

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.

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