Datacenter Hardware Lead — Reliability & Fleet Health

OpenAI; California (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks a Datacenter Hardware Technician Lead to act as the senior on-site technical authority for hardware reliability at one of our flagship campuses.

The role bridges hardware operations, sustaining engineering, and fleet reliability, partnering with CSPs, fleet-health engineers, engineering teams, and OEMs to diagnose and resolve production issues and drive RCA and lifecycle programs.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience supporting large-scale datacenter hardware infrastructure in senior roles.
• Deep expertise with server platforms, GPU systems, storage, rack integration, and datacenter hardware architecture.
• Strong experience diagnosing complex hardware failures and leading repair efforts in production environments.
• Experience conducting root cause analysis and driving long‑term corrective actions.
• Strong understanding of hardware reliability engineering and fleet‑health management.
• Proven ability to partner across engineering, operations, manufacturing, and vendor groups.
• Comfortable working independently in high-priority production environments with significant operational responsibility.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical triage and resolution of complex hardware failures impacting production systems.
• Partner with Fleet Health Engineering to investigate recurring issues and improve fleet reliability.
• Lead RCA efforts and develop corrective action plans.
• Coordinate repairs, replacements, upgrades, and lifecycle activities with CSPs and OEMs.
• Establish and improve hardware maintenance procedures and runbooks.
• Analyze failure trends and operational metrics to identify risks and improvements.
• Support new hardware introductions, validations, and production readiness.
• Coordinate spare parts strategy with supply chain and site teams.
• Provide field feedback to hardware engineering and manufacturing to improve designs.
• Mentor on-site technicians in advanced troubleshooting.

Skills

Datacenter hardware operations

Hardware troubleshooting

Root cause analysis

Cross-functional collaboration

Leadership

Documentation

Vendor coordination

Field service planning

Tools

Fleet health systems

Telemetry platforms

Monitoring tools

Linux administration

Hardware validation workflows

Job description

OpenAI seeks a Datacenter Hardware Technician Lead to act as the senior on-site technical authority for hardware reliability at one of our flagship campuses.

The role bridges hardware operations, sustaining engineering, and fleet reliability, partnering with CSPs, fleet-health engineers, engineering teams, and OEMs to diagnose and resolve production issues and drive RCA and lifecycle programs.