Electrical Commissioning Lead

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco is seeking an Electrical Commissioning Lead to own planning, readiness, and testing oversight for electrical systems on critical infrastructure projects. This role ensures systems are inspectable, testable, and safe to energize.

You will coordinate with engineers, contractors, and vendors, develop procedures, review designs, and drive issue resolution through formal test evidence and closeout.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of electrical commissioning or related field experience on complex infrastructure projects.
• Knowledge of electrical distribution, grounding, controls, and safe energization workflows.
• Experience reviewing commissioning specs, checklists, and test reports.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain commissioning scope, readiness criteria, and test execution plans.
• Coordinate QA/QC inspections with contractors and vendor field/test engineers.
• Lead electrical test results reviews, issue tracking, and retest planning.
• Develop and review commissioning procedures including startup and energization readiness.
• Coordinate with vendors on factory/site acceptance and test prerequisites.
• Support energization planning and safety coordination.
• Maintain dashboards for risk, resources, and test readiness.
• Turnover documentation readiness for operations.

Skills

Electrical commissioning

Field engineering

Startup and testing

Coordination across teams

Safety and risk assessment

Technical documentation

Job description

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.

Location: 100% Onsite In Texas or Georgia

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

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.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.