Data Center Capacity Strategist — Portfolio Planning Leader

OpenAI; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI

OpenAI team collaboration

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Development Planner to own portfolio-level planning for future data center shell capacity. You will translate forecasts, power availability, and technical requirements into a clear strategy for where, when, and how much shell capacity to secure or build.

This individual-contributor role requires strong analytical judgment and the ability to drive decisions across teams without formal authority, aligning land, design, procurement, and construction into a single capacity view.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in data center development, infrastructure planning, capacity planning, real estate development, construction planning, program controls, or related field.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a multi-year portfolio plan for data center shell capacity across priority geographies.
• Translate compute forecasts, IT-load requirements, rack-density assumptions, power schedules, cooling requirements, and deployment timelines into site and building requirements.
• Determine when shell capacity must be secured, designed, constructed, commissioned, and ready for technical fit-out.
• Integrate land, utility, interconnection, permitting, design, procurement, construction, commissioning, and network-readiness schedules into a single capacity view.
• Identify capacity gaps, schedule conflicts, stranded-capacity risks, and dependencies that could prevent infrastructure from becoming operational on time.
• Develop scenario models comparing self-build, lease, colocation, and strategic development-partner options.
• Evaluate delivery pathways based on schedule, cost, control, flexibility, reliability, scalability, and execution risk.
• Recommend campus, building, and utility phasing that preserves optionality while supporting near‑term deployment requirements.
• Assess third‑party proposals and determine whether proposed facilities, schedules, technical specifications, and commercial structures can satisfy OpenAI’s requirements.
• Partner with capacity planning, energy, real estate, site development, design, construction, commissioning, networking, finance, legal, and commercial teams.
• Establish planning assumptions, readiness criteria, decision gates, and governance for moving opportunities from portfolio planning into execution.
• Build dashboards and executive‑ready materials that communicate capacity supply, demand, timing, assumptions, dependencies, and material risks.
• Support investment, build‑versus‑partner, geographic‑prioritization, and portfolio‑allocation decisions.
• Create repeatable planning frameworks and playbooks that allow OpenAI to scale shell‑capacity decisions across regions and infrastructure generations.

Skills

Portfolio planning

Data center capacity planning

Scenario modeling

Cross-functional leadership

Executive communication

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a Development Planner to own portfolio-level planning for future data center shell capacity. You will translate forecasts, power availability, and technical requirements into a clear strategy for where, when, and how much shell capacity to secure or build.

This individual-contributor role requires strong analytical judgment and the ability to drive decisions across teams without formal authority, aligning land, design, procurement, and construction into a single capacity view.