Data Center Controls Network Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI is building the infrastructure foundation for the next generation of AI. The Data Center Engineering team defines the strategy, reference architectures, technical requirements, and delivery standards for the large-scale data centers that support OpenAI research, products, and infrastructure partners.

As a Data Center Controls Network Engineer, you will design, validate, and scale the controls and OT network architectures that support high-density AI data centers. You will work across controls systems, OT infrastructure, telemetry, commissioning, deployment, and operations, partnering with mechanical, electrical, IT/networking, security, and external delivery teams.

About the Role

We are seeking a mid to senior OT Network Engineer with a strong controls systems background to lead the design and operation of resilient, secure, and scalable OT network architectures for high-density AI data centers. This role translates compute, power, cooling, and operational requirements into practical OT network designs, evaluates vendor solutions, and drives technical decisions across controls infrastructure, telemetry, commissioning, and operations.

The ideal candidate has strong hands-on experience in mission-critical OT environments, including industrial networking, virtualized infrastructure, and OT network operations, with expertise in routing, switching, segmentation, firewall policy, time synchronization, monitoring, and network lifecycle support.

Key Responsibilities

- Define controls, automation, and OT network requirements for AI data center campuses.

- Develop reference architectures, engineering standards, and reusable design templates.

- Review and develop basis-of-design and functional design documents, including OT network diagrams, IP/VLAN schemes, telemetry architectures, data flow diagrams, and commissioning requirements.

- Design OT and infrastructure network architectures, including physical topology, logical topology, IP addressing, subnetting, VLANs, routing, switching, redundancy, segmentation, firewall policy coordination, out-of-band management, monitoring, and remote access patterns.

- Develop day-two network operations requirements, including change management, configuration backups, golden configurations, monitoring thresholds, firmware lifecycle, rollback plans, and post-change validation.

- Partner with electrical, mechanical, IT/networking, security, and operations teams to ensure OT network systems align with GPU deployments, campus-wide telemetry, and failure-domain isolation requirements.

- Define integration patterns and protocol requirements across BACnet/IP, BACnet MSTP, Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, IEC-61850 MMS/GOOSE, MQTT, SNMP, syslog, NTP/PTP, IRIG-B, and vendor-specific interfaces.

- Lead technical evaluation of controls integrators, network equipment suppliers, design consultants, contractors, and commissioning agents

- Review network equipment submittals, configurations, firmware assumptions, certifications, test reports, and quality documentation.

- Support factory witnessed testing (FWT), site acceptance testing, network readiness checks, failover testing, and integrated systems testing.

- Troubleshoot complex controls network issues including packet loss, latency, duplicate IPs, routing errors, firewall drops, protocol incompatibilities, time synchronization drift, and intermittent device communication failures.

Qualifications

- 8+ years of relevant experience in controls engineering, industrial automation, OT networking, mission-critical facilities, or similar critical infrastructure environments.

- Strong expertise in resilient OT network architecture, implementation, troubleshooting, and lifecycle support.

- Experience with OT/IT boundary design, secure enterprise integration, firewall policy design, redundant topologies, out-of-band management, and monitoring.

- Hands-on experience with Layer 3 OT network design, including IP addressing, subnetting, routing, VRFs, ACLs, inter-VLAN traffic control, and network segmentation.

- Hands-on experience with Layer 2 security and switching controls, including MACsec, port security, loop prevention, and switch-level access control.

- Hands-on experience in designing resilient OT network topologies using industrial redundancy protocols and architectures such as PRP, HSR, Cisco REP, RSTP/MSTP, and ring or star topologies.

- Hands-on experience in designing resilient infrastructure network architectures using HSRP/VRRP, spine-leaf topologies, redundant uplinks, and failure-domain isolation.

- Hands-on experience with industrial and infrastructure network equipment such as Cisco switches/routers, Juniper switches/routers, Palo Alto firewalls, Rockwell Automation Stratix switches, Siemens Ruggedcom or comparable industrial networking platforms.

- Experience with network management and observability platforms such as Cisco Catalyst Center (DNA Center), Palo Alto Panorama, Juniper Mist, industrial NMS tools, packet brokers, and OT monitoring platforms.

- Hands-on experience with industrial Ethernet, VPN tunneling, IPsec-based connectivity, and secure remote access.

- Hands-on experience with virtualized OT or controls server environments such as VMware vSAN, Microsoft Azure Stack HCI / Hyper-V, or comparable infrastructure platforms.

- Experience with industrial communication and OT infrastructure protocols, including BACnet/IP, BACnet MSTP, Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, IEC-61850 MMS/GOOSE, MQTT, SNMP, syslog, NTP/PTP, IRIG-B, and vendor-specific interfaces, and strong understanding of their behavior across OT network architectures.

- Experience reviewing and producing technical design documentation, commissioning plans, and acceptance test procedures.

- Experience with factory witnessed testing, site acceptance testing, failover testing, telemetry validation, protocol compatibility testing, and root-cause analysis.

- Ability to use logs, packet captures, and field observations to make sound technical decisions and communicate risk clearly.

- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline.

Preferred Skills

- Master's degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Network Engineering, Systems Engineering, or a related discipline.

- Experience leading multi-campus OT network integration, commissioning, and operations across cross-functional teams, contractors, vendors, and delivery partners.

- Relevant networking certifications such as Cisco CCNA/CCNP, Palo Alto PCNSA/PCNSE, Juniper JNCIA/JNCIS, or similar networking credentials.

- Cybersecurity certifications such as CISSP, GICSP, ISA/IEC 62443, CompTIA Security+, or similar cybersecurity credentials are a plus.

- Experience with network automation, Git-based configuration management, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Python, or similar to support scalable OT network deployment and lifecycle management.

- Experience with scripting, APIs, and automation workflows that improve OT network operations.

- Experience using AI agents or MCP-connected tools to support telemetry analysis,and troubleshooting.

- Experience with relational database systems such as PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL, or similar platforms used for OT telemetry, historian integrations, troubleshooting, and reporting.

Work Environment and Travel

- This role requires periodic travel to data center campuses, vendors, labs, construction sites, commissioning activities, and controls/network cutovers.

- The engineer should be comfortable working across office, lab, construction, and live data center environments, including PPE, lockout/tagout, cyber hygiene, and change-control requirements.

- Work may include time-sensitive support during commissioning, startup, vendor testing, cutovers, network changes, telemetry issues, automation failures, and operational events.

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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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