Hardware Operations Engineer

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a Datacenter Hardware Technician Lead to serve as the senior on-site technical authority for hardware reliability and fleet health at one of our flagship AI campuses. You will drive root cause investigations, coordinate repairs with OEMs, and mentor on-site technicians, ensuring production systems remain robust as we scale.

The role demands deep hands-on datacenter hardware expertise, strong troubleshooting, and cross-functional leadership to standardize maintenance and

Qualifications

• 8+ years in large-scale datacenter hardware with senior technician or leadership experience.
• Deep expertise in servers, GPUs, storage, rack integration and hardware architecture.
• Experience diagnosing complex hardware failures and leading repairs in production.
• Proven RCA and long-term corrective actions experience.
• Strong fleet-health and reliability engineering knowledge.
• Ability to partner across engineering, operations, manufacturing and vendors.
• Willingness to travel occasionally to support new campuses.

Responsibilities

• Drive triage and resolution of complex hardware failures in production.
• Collaborate with Fleet Health Engineering to identify failure patterns and improve reliability.
• Lead RCA efforts and develop corrective action plans.
• Coordinate repairs, replacements, upgrades with CSPs and OEMs.
• Establish maintenance procedures and runbooks; improve troubleshooting standards.
• Analyze failure trends and operational metrics for reliability risks.
• Support new hardware introductions and production readiness reviews.
• Manage spare parts strategy with supply chain and sites.
• Mentor on-site technicians on advanced troubleshooting.
• Develop scalable operational standards for future campuses.

Skills

Datacenter hardware

GPU systems

Server platforms

Rack integration

Fleet health

Root cause analysis

Cross-functional leadership

Troubleshooting

Tools

FRACAS

RCCA

Linux

Hardware validation

Job description

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Our Industrial Compute organization develops and deploys large-scale AI campuses designed to support the next generation of frontier model training and inference workloads.

The Hardware Operations team is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and lifecycle health of OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. We partner closely with Data Center Operations, Fleet Health Engineering, Manufacturing, Network Infrastructure, Capacity Planning, and our infrastructure partners to maintain world-class operational performance across rapidly expanding AI environments.

As we scale globally, we are building the operational frameworks, reliability standards, and sustaining engineering practices required to support thousands of GPUs and servers across multiple campuses.

About the Role

We are seeking a Datacenter Hardware Technician Lead to serve as the senior on-site technical authority for hardware reliability and fleet health at one of OpenAI’s flagship AI campuses.

This role operates at the intersection of hardware operations, sustaining engineering, and fleet reliability. You will partner closely with Cloud Service Provider operations teams, OpenAI fleet-health engineers, hardware engineering teams, and OEM vendors to identify, diagnose, and resolve hardware issues affecting production systems.

Beyond day-to-day operational support, you will drive root cause investigations, reliability improvement initiatives, lifecycle management programs, and operational readiness efforts. You will help establish hardware maintenance standards, operational procedures, and best practices that scale across future OpenAI infrastructure deployments.

The ideal candidate combines deep hands‑on datacenter hardware expertise with strong troubleshooting, failure analysis, and cross‑functional leadership skills.

Candidates must be able to sit onsite at our datacenters 5 days per week.

Key Responsibilities

Drive technical triage and resolution of complex hardware failures impacting production systems.

Partner with Fleet Health Engineering to investigate recurring hardware issues, identify failure patterns, and improve fleet reliability.

Lead root cause analysis (RCA) efforts for critical hardware incidents and develop corrective and preventive action plans.

Collaborate with Cloud Service Provider operations teams and OEM vendors to coordinate repairs, replacements, upgrades, and hardware lifecycle activities.

Establish and continuously improve hardware maintenance procedures, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting standards.

Analyze hardware failure trends and operational metrics to identify reliability risks and improvement opportunities.

Support new hardware introductions, validation activities, and production readiness reviews.

Coordinate spare parts strategy and inventory planning with supply chain and site teams.

Partner with Hardware Engineering, Manufacturing, and Infrastructure teams to provide field feedback that improves future platform designs.

Develop scalable operational standards and best practices that can be deployed across future Stargate campuses.

Mentor on-site technicians and partner teams on advanced troubleshooting methodologies and hardware operational excellence.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience supporting large-scale datacenter hardware infrastructure, with experience in a senior technician, sustaining engineering, or hardware operations leadership role.

Deep expertise with server platforms, GPU systems, storage infrastructure, 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 principles and fleet‑health management.

Proven ability to partner effectively across engineering, operations, manufacturing, and vendor organizations.

Comfortable operating independently in high‑priority production environments with significant operational responsibility.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence technical and operational decisions.

Experience developing operational processes, maintenance standards, and technical documentation.

Ability to travel occasionally to support new campus deployments and operational readiness activities.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience supporting large-scale GPU clusters or AI/ML infrastructure environments.

Familiarity with fleet health systems, telemetry platforms, and hardware monitoring tools.

Ability to identify appropriate data and perform detailed analysis to support all elements of this role, including dashboard development

Experience with failure analysis methodologies such as FRACAS, RCCA, 5-Why, Fishbone, or FMEA.

Knowledge of Linux system administration and hardware validation workflows.

Experience supporting hyperscale datacenter operations or HPC environments.

Familiarity with server manufacturing, rack integration, and NPI-to-sustaining transitions.

Industry certifications such as CompTIA Server+, OEM hardware certifications, or equivalent experience.

Experience applying Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) practices in mission‑critical datacenter environments.

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.