Development Lead

About the Team

OpenAI is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Site Readiness & Development team owns the upstream diligence and development work required to convert powered-land opportunities into executable infrastructure options.

About the Role

The Development Lead owns the development path after a site clears initial screening. This role validates the viable power pathway, turns site constraints into a building-level deployment plan that makes clear when each building can deploy, and runs the phase-by-phase action list that closes the decisions, dependencies, and evidence gaps needed to make a site controllable and executable.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the stage-gate path from exclusivity and commercial terms through desktop diligence, confirmatory diligence, site closing, and handoff into design, construction, and operations.

• Validate power pathways with Power and utility partners, including service options, interconnection and delivery sequencing, readiness assumptions, schedule exposure, cost implications, and decision points.

• Turn each development phase into a disciplined action list with owners, deadlines, closure criteria, open evidence, and escalation paths; drive the list to closure rather than simply reporting status.

• Translate power, land, civil, environmental, access, entitlement, and permitting constraints into a building-level deployment plan with clear sequencing and target deployment timing for each building.

• Coordinate site access, exclusivity, LOI, commercial terms, financing assumptions, and closing requirements with Commercial, Legal, Finance, Power, Land, and other partner teams.

• Define the desktop diligence scope, expected 15–30 day deliverables, and go / no-go criteria; then govern the 90–120 day confirmatory diligence plan.

• Set and track ECDs for easements, offsite improvements, well and pipeline locating, environmental studies, water-well testing, geotechnical reports, additional land, incentives, and other site-specific workstreams.

• Scope and manage diligence vendors and consultants, keeping their outputs tied to decisions, schedule, cost, action-list closure, and residual risk.

• Maintain the integrated development schedule, budget implications, dependency tracker, risk register, mitigation plan, and executive escalation cadence.

• Deliver executive-ready advance, defer, or stop recommendations and prepare the readiness package for transition into design, construction, and operations.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in land development, infrastructure development, data center development, energy-project development, electrical, mechanical, civil or environmental engineering, or related project delivery.

• Experience advancing large-scale facility programs through early planning, power validation, phased development, site closing, and readiness handoff.

• Strong ability to evaluate power pathways and translate utility, interconnection, and delivery findings into schedule, cost, and deployment implications.

• Highly organized operator who can convert ambiguous diligence into owner-based action lists, closure criteria, critical paths, and executive decisions.

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.

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