Strategic Compute Capacity Planning Lead

About this role

About the Team

The Strategic Partnerships team is responsible for building and managing the partnerships, supply commitments, and strategic deals that enable OpenAI’s long-term infrastructure roadmap. We work closely with Infrastructure, Finance, Research, Product, and Engineering to connect OpenAI’s compute requirements with capacity strategy, investment decisions, and external partnerships.

About the Role

As a Strategic Compute Capacity Planning Lead, you will build and lead OpenAI’s capacity planning, allocation, and forecasting function across GPU and non-GPU infrastructure, including CPU and storage. You will translate research, product, and business demand into a disciplined capacity plan that defines what infrastructure we need, when and where we need it, how it should be allocated, and the financial and strategic tradeoffs involved.

We’re looking for people who combine strategic thinking, financial judgment, and operational rigor with the ability to build new processes from the ground up. You will partner deeply across technical and business teams to create a forward-looking operating model for capacity planning and help leadership make informed infrastructure decisions.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Build the operating model for capacity planning across GPUs, CPUs, storage, and other critical infrastructure.

- Forecast demand across training, inference, research, product, and enterprise workloads.

- Translate demand forecasts into infrastructure requirements, including compute shapes, timing, location, vendor needs, and financial plans.

- Develop frameworks for allocating scarce capacity across competing research, product, and business priorities.

- Model ROI, total cost of ownership, utilization, and strategic tradeoffs for major compute and infrastructure decisions.

- Partner with Strategic Partnerships and infrastructure teams on capacity deals, vendor strategies, and supply commitments.

- Build scenario plans for demand spikes, supply constraints, product launches, and changes to the research roadmap.

- Establish an executive operating cadence for capacity reviews, allocation decisions, forecast updates, and escalations.

- Create clear visibility into supply gaps, demand risks, utilization tradeoffs, and infrastructure investment choices.

- Move capacity planning from an ad hoc process to a rigorous, repeatable, and forward-looking strategic function.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Bring strong experience in strategic planning, finance, operations, infrastructure strategy, partnerships, or complex commercial deals.

- Can translate technical requirements and uncertain demand signals into clear operating and financial plans.

- Have experience evaluating infrastructure investments through ROI, cost, utilization, and scenario-based frameworks.

- Are comfortable working across Research, Product, Engineering, Finance, and business teams with different priorities and planning horizons.

- Can create decision-making frameworks for allocating scarce resources across competing needs.

- Pair strategic judgment with a willingness to work hands-on, especially when building a new function or operating process.

- Communicate complex tradeoffs clearly and can drive alignment with senior technical and business leaders.

- Operate effectively in a fast-moving environment where supply, demand, and organizational priorities can change quickly.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made

Similar jobs

• Strategic Compute Finance Lead — Andromeda · Remote
• Senior Hardware Infrastructure Capacity Planner — Crusoe · San Francisco, CA - US
• Strategic Sourcing Manager, Compute Infrastructure — Openai · San Francisco
• Senior Capacity Planning Analyst — Asteralabs · San Jose, California, United States
• Director, Compute Infrastructure Procurement Operations — Anthropic · San Francisco, CA | New York City, NY
• Senior Cloud Capacity Engineer — Thenewyorktimes · New York, NY
• Compute Strategy & Operations Lead — Modal · New York
• Principal Technical Program Manager, Compute — Roblox · San Mateo, CA, United States