Electrical Commissioning Lead

About the Role

The Electrical Commissioning Lead owns electrical commissioning planning, readiness, quality coordination, and test execution oversight for the project. This role ensures electrical systems are inspectable, testable, safe to energize, and ready for coordinated functional and integrated systems testing.

Reports to the Commissioning Project Lead and partners closely with electrical contractors, equipment vendors, design/engineering teams, the mechanical commissioning lead, controls stakeholders, and vendor field/test engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain the electrical commissioning scope, readiness criteria, inspection strategy, and test execution plan.

• Review electrical design packages, specifications, submittals, method statements, sequence assumptions, and testing requirements for commissionability and risk.

• Coordinate electrical QA/QC inspections with contractors and vendor field/test engineers, including installation checks, pre-functional readiness, deficiency capture, and closeout tracking.

• Own electrical commissioning procedure development and review, including startup, energization readiness, functional testing, failure mode validation, controls interfaces, and integrated systems testing inputs.

• Coordinate with equipment vendors on factory/site acceptance requirements, startup support, test prerequisites, documentation packages, and vendor participation during critical tests.

• Support energization planning, switching and safety coordination, access sequencing, temporary conditions, witness points, and hold points.

• Lead discipline-level review of electrical test results, deficiencies, corrective actions, retest requirements, and acceptance evidence.

• Maintain electrical commissioning dashboards and status inputs for the Commissioning Project Lead, including risk items, resource needs, test readiness, and issue aging.

• Partner with the Mechanical Commissioning Lead on cross-discipline dependencies, including controls, life safety interfaces, heat load testing, power-to-mechanical coordination, and integrated testing scenarios.

• Support turnover by confirming electrical documentation, as-built evidence, test records, and outstanding issue disposition are complete and usable by operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of electrical commissioning, electrical construction, field engineering, startup, testing, or owner representative experience on complex technical infrastructure projects.

• Strong knowledge of electrical distribution, backup or standby power systems, grounding and bonding, electrical controls/interfaces, protection concepts, and safe energization workflows as applicable to the project scope.

• Experience reviewing commissioning specifications, inspection checklists, functional test scripts, vendor startup procedures, and test reports.

• Ability to coordinate field execution across contractors, equipment vendors, QA/QC teams, commissioning partners, and project leadership.

• Strong practical judgment around readiness, safety, sequencing, test prerequisites, and risk escalation.

• Comfort working in construction environments with evolving schedules and multiple parallel work fronts.

• Clear technical writing skills and discipline in maintaining logs, test evidence, issue records, and decision history.

• Ability to be present at the project site during critical electrical installation, startup, energization, and testing windows.

Preferred Skills

• Owner-side or commissioning agent experience on mission-critical, utility-scale, industrial, manufacturing, data center, or other high-reliability facilities.

• Professional engineering, electrical license, commissioning credential, or equivalent field qualification.

• Experience with integrated systems testing and coordination between electrical, mechanical, controls, and operations teams.

• Familiarity with digital issue tracking, commissioning management platforms, schedule tools, and field reporting workflows.

• PE license

• Commissioning certification eg. QCxP, CxA, BCxP, CCP

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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