Data Center Infrastructure Electrical Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI is building the infrastructure foundation for the next generation of AI. The Data Center Engineering team defines the strategy, reference architectures, technical requirements, and delivery standards for the large-scale data centers that support OpenAI research, products, and infrastructure partners.

We are seeking a senior electrical infrastructure engineer to lead the development of reliable, scalable, and efficient power architectures for high-density, liquid-cooled AI data centers.

The ideal candidate has strong practical experience with critical electrical systems at data centers or comparable industrial scale, including medium‑voltage and low‑voltage distribution, utility interfaces, backup power, UPS and battery systems, rack power delivery, grounding, protection, controls, and monitoring systems.

You should be comfortable moving between long‑range architecture, detailed engineering review, lab validation, vendor qualification, field deployment, and operational troubleshooting.

• Design and optimize electrical topologies and equipment strategies that reduce cost, accelerate schedules, improve efficiency, increase scalability, and maintain high reliability and maintainability.
• Review and develop basis‑of‑design documents, single‑line diagrams, equipment specifications, commissioning plans, and power system studies including load flow, short circuit, protection coordination, arc flash, and grid transient compliance.
• Lead technical evaluation of equipment vendors, manufacturers, design consultants, commissioning agents, contractors, and test labs. Review submittals, schematics, certifications, quality records, and test reports.
• Evaluate AC and DC power distribution options for high‑density compute, including rectifier architectures, busway, rack power shelves, power supplies, cable management, redundancy strategies, serviceability, and fault isolation.
• Partner with mechanical, cooling, controls, hardware, networking, construction, and operations teams to ensure electrical systems support liquid‑cooled GPU rack deployments and reliable facility operation.
• Drive FAT, SAT, witness testing, burn‑in, reliability testing, interoperability testing, and integrated systems testing for critical infrastructure and rack deployments.
• Help guide and operate an R&D program to validate new equipment, rack designs, telemetry, operating envelopes, failure scenarios, and facility‑to‑hardware interactions.
• Define telemetry and controls requirements including metering, waveform capture, breaker and relay status, UPS and battery health, generator status, rack power, CDU status, coolant conditions, alarms, and control states.
• Analyze lab data, operational incidents, power quality events, nuisance trips, thermal excursions, controls alarms, and rack‑level failures to improve designs, procedures, vendor quality, and reliability models.
• Create engineering standards, test procedures, commissioning scripts, operating procedures, decision records, risk registers, and concise executive summaries.
• Provide senior technical escalation support during design reviews, construction, manufacturing validation, commissioning, energization, deployment, and operational events.
• Raise the technical bar across partner teams in electrical design, safety, testing discipline, documentation quality, reliability, and operational rigor.

• 10+ years of electrical engineering experience in mission‑critical facilities such as data centers or comparable critical infrastructure.
• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, power systems, or a related discipline.
• Strong hands‑on experience with MV/LV distribution, transformers, switch gear, switchboards, generators, UPS systems, batteries, PDUs, RPPs, busway, PSUs, grounding, bonding, and protection systems.
• Experience producing and reviewing electrical designs, studies, equipment specifications, commissioning plans, test procedures, and acceptance criteria.
• Experience leading FWTs, FATs, SATs, integrated systems testing, failure‑mode testing, and root‑cause investigations.
• Strong understanding of codes, standards, utility coordination, safety…