Data Center Electrical R&D Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The team defines the technical direction for next-generation data centers and develops the architectures needed to support rapidly evolving AI hardware and workload requirements.

Operating at the intersection of research, engineering, infrastructure, and deployment, the team translates emerging compute requirements into validated electrical designs, reference architectures, prototypes, and scalable infrastructure solutions.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Data Center Electrical R&D Engineer to develop and validate next-generation power architectures for high-density AI infrastructure.

This role is focused on research, advanced design, modeling, prototyping, and technical validation rather than ongoing facility operations. You will investigate emerging electrical technologies, develop system-level architectures, and evaluate new approaches to utility integration, power distribution, backup generation, energy storage, controls, and rack-level power delivery.

You will work closely with compute hardware, mechanical, controls, construction, commissioning, operations, and external technology partners. Your work will shape reusable reference designs that can move from concept and simulation through pilot testing and large-scale deployment.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop advanced electrical architectures for high-density AI data centers, from utility interconnection through rack-level power delivery. - Translate evolving compute-platform requirements into electrical capacity, topology, redundancy, power-quality, protection, and control requirements. - Create conceptual designs, basis-of-design documents, specifications, one-line diagrams, design standards, and reusable reference architectures. - Model electrical-system performance, capacity, efficiency, reliability, fault conditions, transient behavior, and failure scenarios. - Evaluate emerging technologies such as medium-voltage distribution, solid-state power conversion, advanced UPS systems, energy storage, alternative generation, and direct-current architectures. - Build technical and economic comparisons across competing design approaches, including reliability, efficiency, scalability, cost, constructability, maintainability, and deployment speed. - Develop prototypes, test plans, acceptance criteria, and validation frameworks for new electrical technologies and system architectures. - Lead laboratory, factory, pilot-site, and field testing to validate design assumptions and identify performance or integration gaps. - Partner with mechanical and thermal engineers to optimize power and cooling architectures as an integrated system. - Collaborate with AI hardware and compute teams to understand workload behavior, rack density, utilization, power variability, and future platform requirements. - Work with controls and software teams to define instrumentation, telemetry, protection, monitoring, and automated-control requirements. - Partner with construction, commissioning, and operations teams to ensure new designs can be safely built, tested, operated, and maintained. - Engage equipment manufacturers, utilities, engineering consultants, and research partners to evaluate capabilities and accelerate technology development. - Investigate system failures and unexpected test results, identify root causes, and translate findings into design improvements. - Document validated designs, technical decisions, operating envelopes, lessons learned, and deployment guidance. - Provide technical direction and design-review leadership across internal teams and external engineering partners.