About the Team
OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization builds and operates the infrastructure required to train and serve frontier AI models. The Capacity Planning team connects rapidly changing research and product demand with the compute, networking, storage, power, data center, hardware, and operational resources required to make that demand executable.
About the Role
We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to build and lead capacity planning across OpenAI's large-scale AI infrastructure. You will translate uncertain workload demand into clear infrastructure requirements, allocation decisions, supply commitments, activation priorities, and long-range capacity strategies.
This role sits at the intersection of research, engineering, infrastructure, finance, sourcing, deployment, and operations. You will create the planning models, operating cadences, governance mechanisms, and source-of-truth systems that allow teams to understand what capacity is required, what is available, what is at risk, and what decisions must be made.
This is not a finance-only forecasting or reporting role. Success requires technical fluency across the infrastructure stack, strong analytical judgment, and the ability to move consequential decisions forward when requirements, timelines, and supply conditions change quickly.
Key Responsibilities
- Own capacity-planning processes across near-term workload allocation, quarterly execution, and longer-range infrastructure horizons.
- Translate research, training, inference, and product demand into compute, accelerator, cluster, networking, storage, rack, power, and site requirements.
- Develop scenarios that make assumptions, confidence levels, constraints, sensitivities, and decision points explicit.
- Reconcile requested demand against contracted, delivered, installed, activated, and workload-usable capacity.
- Partner with research and engineering teams to understand workload priorities, technical dependencies, utilization patterns, and changing requirements.
- Partner with sourcing, finance, hardware, deployment, and operations teams to align supply commitments, activation schedules, costs, and delivery risks.
- Support allocation and prioritization decisions when infrastructure is constrained or delivery plans change.
- Track infrastructure lead times, critical dependencies, utilization, headroom, forecast accuracy, activation readiness, and capacity risk.
- Build dashboards, analytical tools, executive updates, and operating cadences that create a credible source of truth.
- Drive mitigation plans for site delays, hardware shortages, network or storage constraints, workload changes, and other capacity risks.
- Continuously improve planning models, governance, data quality, and accountability as OpenAI's infrastructure scales.
Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience in technical program management, infrastructure capacity planning, cloud infrastructure, supply planning, or a closely related field.
- Demonstrated ownership of capacity planning for large-scale distributed systems, cloud platforms, AI or ML workloads, or hyperscale infrastructure.
- Ability to translate ambiguous demand into structured assumptions, scenarios, technical resource requirements, and executable plans.
- Technical fluency across compute, networking, storage, data center infrastructure, utilization, reliability, and deployment dependencies.
- Strong analytical skills and experience developing planning models, operational metrics, dashboards, or data-driven decision systems.
- Experience leading decisions across engineering, finance, sourcing, deployment, operations, and executive stakeholders.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain uncertainty, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly.
Preferred Skills
- Experience planning GPU, accelerator, or AI infrastructure capacity for training or inference workloads.
- Experience with cluster allocation, cloud capacity, hardware supply, infrastructure procurement, site readiness, or production activation.
- Familiarity with forecasting methods, scenario planning, optimization, cost attribution, capacity economics, and utilization management.
- Experience building planning tools or source-of-truth systems using SQL, Python, spreadsheets, BI platforms, or similar technologies.
- Track record of improving utilization, reducing infrastructure cost or risk, and enabling critical workloads during periods of constrained supply.
Location
San Francisco, California. This role requires regular in-person collaboration with infrastructure, research, and operational partners.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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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