Commissioning Program Manager, Infrastructure Delivery

About the Team

OpenAI’s Industrial Compute organization is building the infrastructure required to support the next generation of frontier AI systems. Through a combination of strategic partnerships and self-built data center campuses, we are scaling the physical infrastructure needed to deliver compute at unprecedented scale.

The Commissioning organization is responsible for ensuring this infrastructure is safely tested, validated, integrated, and transitioned into reliable operations. As the portfolio grows, the team is building common standards, processes, tools, and reporting systems that allow commissioning programs to operate consistently across projects while giving teams and leadership clear visibility into readiness, risk, and execution.

About the Role

We are seeking a Commissioning Program Manager to build and scale the operating systems behind OpenAI’s infrastructure commissioning programs.

You will own the development and continuous improvement of commissioning standards, processes, tools, dashboards, and KPIs across the infrastructure portfolio. You will work closely with commissioning and construction teams to translate field execution needs into practical playbooks, workflows, templates, metrics, and reporting mechanisms that teams can use from construction readiness through testing and turnover.

This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure delivery, program management, process design, and data. The ideal candidate understands how complex construction projects operate and can turn fragmented workflows and project data into repeatable systems that improve execution without creating unnecessary administrative burden.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop and maintain commissioning program standards, playbooks, process maps, templates, checklists, stage gates, and acceptance criteria across infrastructure projects.

- Establish consistent workflows for commissioning planning, construction readiness, QA/QC, issue management, document control, testing evidence, turnover, and lessons learned.

- Define and maintain commissioning KPIs, dashboards, and scorecards that provide visibility into readiness, inspection completion, deficiencies, test progress, data quality, and turnover health.

- Own requirements and operating workflows across commissioning trackers, construction management platforms, QA/QC systems, spreadsheets, and business intelligence tools.

- Partner closely with commissioning and construction leads to translate field execution needs into practical processes and tools that can scale across projects.

- Monitor adoption, data quality, and effectiveness of commissioning standards and tools; identify gaps and drive improvements as project and portfolio needs evolve.

- Establish reporting cadences and develop executive-ready reporting that clearly communicates commissioning health, trends, blockers, risks, and decisions required.

- Pilot new standards, processes, metrics, and tools on active projects, incorporate field feedback, and scale successful approaches across the infrastructure portfolio.

- Partner with data, analytics, and tooling teams to improve automation, source-of-truth alignment, data integrity, and reporting reliability.

- Drive continuous improvement by capturing lessons learned from project execution and incorporating them into future commissioning standards, workflows, dashboards, and KPIs.

Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in program management, project management, construction management, engineering, commissioning, facilities, project controls, or infrastructure delivery.

- Hands-on experience working in construction or complex infrastructure environments, with an understanding of how field work is planned, coordinated, tracked, documented, tested, and turned over.

- Experience developing or improving program standards, SOPs, process maps, playbooks, templates, trackers, stage gates, or operating rhythms used by project teams.

- Strong comfort with data, metrics, dashboards, and reporting, including the ability to define meaningful KPIs, identify data-quality issues, and translate project information into actionable insights.

- Working knowledge of commissioning, QA/QC, inspections, deficiency management, testing documentation, readiness reviews, or turnover processes; direct commissioning experience is strongly preferred.

- Experience with construction, commissioning, project management, or analytics platforms such as Procore, Autodesk Construction Cloud, CxAlloy, Bluebeam, Smartsheet, Excel or Google Sheets, Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or similar tools.

- Strong systems thinking with the ability to simplify complex workflows, establish clear ownership, and design processes that work for both field teams and program leadership.

- Demonstrated ability to drive process and tooling adoption across multidisciplinary stakeholders without relying on formal authority.

- Experience building dashboards, scorecards, KPI frameworks, or reporting systems for construction, commissioning, project controls, infrastructure operations, or PMO organizations is preferred.

- Experience with mission-critical infrastructure, data centers, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, laboratories, or other complex technical facilities is preferred; PMP, Lean/Six Sigma, CxA, QCxP, or related credentials are a plus.

Location

This role is based in the San Francisco office or at an OpenAI self-build data center campus and is not a remote position.

Periodic travel to project sites is expected to develop a direct understanding of construction and commissioning workflows, support project teams, and ensure program standards and tools reflect field execution needs. Travel is expected to be less than 20%.

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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