Design Engineer: Power Generation

About the Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Industrial Compute organization develops and delivers the large-scale power, data center, and compute infrastructure required to support frontier AI systems. The Data Center Engineering team works across energy, electrical, mechanical, controls, site development, construction, commissioning, operations, and external partners to turn demanding campus power requirements into safe, reliable, and executable solutions.

About the Role

We are seeking a Design Engineer, Power Generation to develop and integrate power-generation systems for large-scale AI infrastructure campuses. You will translate campus load, reliability, schedule, and operating requirements into practical generation architectures and technical design criteria, supporting both behind-the-meter generation and hybrid grid-and-generation strategies.

This is an individual contributor role with broad technical ownership from early concept and technology evaluation through detailed design, equipment selection, construction support, commissioning, and performance validation. You will work with internal engineering teams, utilities, OEMs, EPC partners, developers, and operators to resolve interfaces, make disciplined tradeoffs, and establish repeatable power-generation designs that can scale across the portfolio.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop power-generation concepts, reference architectures, design criteria, and site-specific requirements based on campus demand, phasing, reliability targets, grid availability, fuel strategy, site constraints, and operating objectives.

- Evaluate generation technologies and system configurations, including gas turbines, reciprocating engines, fuel cells, battery energy storage, microgrids, black-start systems, and hybrid grid-connected solutions.

- Define and review plant electrical and mechanical balance-of-plant requirements, protection and controls philosophy, grid-paralleling and islanding behavior, redundancy, maintainability, and operational modes.

- Translate AI infrastructure load profiles and deployment schedules into generation capacity plans, equipment sizing, ramp strategies, performance requirements, and commissioning criteria.

- Lead technical diligence of OEM, EPC, developer, and supplier proposals; review calculations, one-line diagrams, layouts, specifications, studies, schedules, and design assumptions to identify gaps and material risks.

- Coordinate interfaces across utility interconnection, substations, campus electrical distribution, cooling systems, controls, fuel supply, emissions, water, civil design, permitting, construction, and operations.

- Evaluate tradeoffs across availability, efficiency, emissions, cost, schedule, constructibility, scalability, maintainability, and long-term operating flexibility, and document clear technical recommendations.

- Support equipment selection, procurement, design reviews, factory and site acceptance testing, construction issue resolution, commissioning, performance testing, and operational handoff.

- Investigate design or field-performance issues, drive corrective actions with partners, and incorporate lessons learned into engineering standards, specifications, and future reference designs.

Qualifications

- 8+ years of engineering experience in power generation or industrial power systems, including responsibility for generation facility design or integration.

- A bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

- Experience taking generation projects from concept and equipment selection through detailed design, with direct involvement in procurement, construction support, commissioning, or performance testing.

- Strong understanding of generation technologies such as gas turbines or reciprocating engines and their supporting electrical, mechanical, and fuel systems, including protection, controls, grid paralleling, islanding, and black start.

- Ability to evaluate engineering studies, drawings, specifications, and supplier proposals; identify technical risks; and make defensible tradeoffs among safety, reliability, cost, schedule, and maintainability.

- Experience resolving design interfaces across engineering disciplines and coordinating equipment suppliers, engineering and construction partners, utilities, and operators.

- Sound judgment around safety, reliability, constructibility, maintainability, and technical risk, with the ability to make decisions when requirements or information are incomplete.

- Ability to document design requirements, assumptions, and decisions clearly and explain technical recommendations to engineering, delivery, commercial, and leadership teams.

Preferred Skills

- Professional Engineer licensure and experience developing reusable engineering standards and reference designs across multiple projects.

- Hands-on experience deploying and commissioning onsite generation for campuses or industrial facilities with demand in the hundreds of megawatts or more, including large load steps and rapid power fluctuations.

- Experience co-designing and deploying battery energy storage systems (BESS) with onsite generation, including power and energy sizing, controls integration, load smoothing, and frequency support.

- Familiarity with utility interconnection studies, emissions and environmental constraints, fuel-supply requirements, and generation permitting.

- Experience validating generation and storage performance through dynamic studies and field testing, including load steps, load rejection, generator trips, and transitions between grid-connected and islanded operation.

- Experience delivering phased campus power, including integrating temporary generation, permanent generation, storage, and utility service while maintaining power to operating loads.

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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