Technical Program Manager, Partnership Site Deployment - Stargate - job 1 of 2

*must be open to at least 3-5 days per week in Abilene, Texas or El Paso, Texas*

About the Team:

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Stargate team is central to this mission, setting the core infra strategy and implementing this vision. From site selection to the buildout process, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, strategy, and operations, interacting with teams and executives inside and outside of OpenAI.

About the Role:

OpenAI is seeking someone who is excited by massive global challenges spanning thousands of stakeholders; someone motivated by solving complex, interconnected problems. The Infrastructure Strategy & Delivery team supporting Stargate is hiring a Technical Program Manager to coordinate datacenter deployments in partnership with external development and operations teams.

Delivering a data center is not easy. It requires a cross-functional understanding of commercial dependencies, build timelines, equipment material readiness, design specifics, commissioning timelines, and much more. Beyond the specifics, it requires the right mindset: to think around corners and de-risk problems before they happen.

This role will focus on site deployment management, ensuring our data center/supercomputer projects are set up for success and delivered on-time and that our strategic partners meet contractual milestones for AI compute delivery. By establishing relationships, establishing critical timelines and commercial SLAs, and driving supplier performance across the data center industrial base, this role will sit at a critical point in OpenAI’s infrastructure, and organizational, strategy. Infrastructure is destiny, and you get to sit in the driver’s seat!

In this role you will:

• Drive partner performance to meet critical commercial SLAs, construction schedules, and compute-deployment commitments.

• Serve as the primary interface with external partners for contract alignment, risk escalation, and high-level reporting.

• De-risk datacenter deployments by identifying critical path items, surfacing blockers early, and coordinating mitigations.

• Manage relationships with internal and external stakeholders, ensuring clear communication and timely decision-making.

• Provide pre-construction support during project approval, establishing benchmarks and structures based on industry best practices.

• Support rack manufacturing ramps by coordinating with partners to track production, shipping, and site-readiness milestones, ensuring racks arrive on schedule and meet quality standards.

• Lead structured program management from pre-construction through commissioning, including forecasting, budget tracking, documentation control, and regular executive updates.

• Oversee project milestones and ensure alignment across vendors—including architects, engineers, suppliers, and construction teams—while maintaining and updating risk registers to evaluate contingencies and drive resolution.

• Support broader site-readiness initiatives such as delivery tracking, turnover planning, and handover readiness.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bachelor's degree in construction management, engineering, or equivalent field.

• Experience managing complicated and complex technical projects

• Experience managing large organizations with senior stakeholders

• A minimum of 7 years of professional experience in construction and project planning within large-scale, multi-project construction programs.

• Proven experience leading project control teams for general contractors.

• Strong collaboration skills and a proactive problem-solving approach.

• Proficiency and fluency in Primavera P6, Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word), and Google Suite.

• Familiarity with cost control tools such as eBuilder, Procore, or similar platforms.

• Ability to effectively communicate financial and scheduling details from multiple construction sites to project stakeholders.

• Excellent communication, presentation, and analytical skills in a highly collaborative environment.

Preferred Skills:

• 10+ years of experience managing project delivery and controls across large data center projects

• Experience managing projects and controls across multiple general contractors and sites

• Expertise in communicating project risks to internal and external executive leadership

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 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.

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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.