White Space Manager, Network & Data Halls

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital and delivery partners, is building the infrastructure required to support frontier AI systems. The Data Center Engineering team defines repeatable technical standards and carries them through design, construction, commissioning, and operational readiness. The team works across data center facilities, power generation, compute infrastructure, construction, procurement, and operations to deliver reliable capacity at unprecedented scale and speed. About the Role We are seeking a White Space Manager to own the planning, coordination, and readiness of data center white-space environments. You will connect facility delivery with compute deployment by coordinating rack layouts, electrical distribution, liquid and air cooling, structured cabling, containment, material flow, installation sequencing, and acceptance. This role is accountable for turning completed building infrastructure into safe, usable, operations-ready data halls that can receive and activate high-density AI systems. Travel: 50% Responsibilities - Own white-space planning and readiness from design development through rack installation, testing, activation, and handoff to operations. - Coordinate rack elevations, floor layouts, service clearances, containment, busway or RPP distribution, cabling pathways, and cooling connections. - Translate compute deployment forecasts into space, power, cooling, network, labor, tooling, and material requirements. - Develop installation sequences, readiness gates, turnover criteria, punch-list processes, and escalation paths across multiple workstreams. - Partner with design, construction, commissioning, networking, hardware operations, safety, logistics, and vendors to resolve cross-system constraints. - Verify field conditions against approved designs and maintain accurate as-built, capacity, asset, and readiness records. - Identify risks to safe installation, energization, cooling availability, network readiness, or schedule and drive mitigations to closure. - Create repeatable white-space standards, checklists, metrics, and operating mechanisms that scale across campuses. Qualifications - 8+ years of experience delivering or operating data center white space, critical facilities, compute deployments, or mission-critical fit-outs. - Strong understanding of racks, power distribution, structured cabling, airflow management, liquid cooling, controls interfaces, and deployment sequencing. - Demonstrated ownership of installation readiness, field coordination, quality, safety, and handoff across several technical disciplines. - Experience interpreting construction documents, rack layouts, one-lines, mechanical diagrams, schedules, and commissioning records. - Ability to manage competing dependencies and make sound decisions in an active construction or production environment. - Strong communication with engineers, contractors, vendors, deployment teams, and operations leaders. - Willingness to travel regularly and spend sustained time at active project sites. Preferred Skills - Experience with high-density GPU or AI infrastructure and direct-to-chip liquid cooling. - Experience with DCIM, asset-management, commissioning, or deployment-readiness systems. - Background in data center construction, commissioning, hardware deployment, or facilities operations. - Bachelor's degree in engineering, construction management, operations, or a related technical field. 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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement. 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 condit

Extensive experience in engineering program management, technical program management, mission-critical infrastructure delivery, data center deployment, or comparable complex execution environments, typically gained through 10+ years of relevant work or equivalent depth of experience. Proven ability to operate within ambiguous, cross-functional engineering programs with shifting requirements, urgent timelines, and high-stakes operational risk, driving from concept through design, validation, procurement, construction, commissioning, deployment, and operations. Proven experience coordinating cross-functional programs that include network, controls, mechanical, electrical, structural, construction, commissioning, or similar disciplines.

Translate assigned infrastructure goals into clear workstream charters, scopes, milestones, owners, decision points, success metrics, resourcing assumptions, and execution plans. Build and maintain integrated execution plans for assigned programs covering network, controls, data hall design, whitespace deployment, commissioning preparation, and deployment readiness. Support coordination across network, controls, structural, electrical, mechanical, hardware integration, construction, commissioning, and operations teams. Work with third-party design teams to define design milestones from concept through detailed design, including basis-of-design development, requirements tracking, design reviews, technical comment resolution, change management, and release readiness. Maintain the dependency map, issue log, risk register, action tracker, and decision log for assigned network and data hall workstreams. Coordinate design and review milestones for network rooms, non-production network services, OT / IT interface points, rack deployment assumptions, telemetry interfaces, controls dependencies, and data hall deployment packages. Track building-level network and support-space interfaces such as MPOE, MMR, Network Core, WAN, support rooms, and associated handoff points where they affect assigned programs. Support the network and controls DRIs by organizing reviews, resolving cross-discipline gaps, surfacing decisions, and keeping partner deliverables aligned to schedule. Manage partner and vendor deliverables such as submittals, interface packages, installation assumptions, turn-up plans, readiness evidence, field issue logs, and corrective action tracking. Drive readiness tracking for assigned 1P, 3P, colo, and selected CSP programs, including bring-up sequencing, installation readiness, access dependencies, maintenance windows, and first-use criteria. Prepare clear status updates, dashboards, and executive-ready summaries for the Industrial Compute lead and project stakeholders. Capture lessons learned from deployment and handoff activities and feed them back into playbooks, standards, and interface definitions.