Hardware Technical Program Manager, Infrastructure Partner Operations

ABOUT THE TEAM The Industrial Compute team is responsible for building the physical infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s largest-scale AI systems. We design, deploy, and operate next-generation compute infrastructure across a rapidly expanding global footprint, combining OpenAI-owned infrastructure with strategic cloud and infrastructure partners to support frontier AI workloads. As our infrastructure footprint grows, operational excellence across third-party providers becomes increasingly critical. Our team ensures external infrastructure partners consistently deliver the reliability, performance, and operational maturity required to support OpenAI’s rapidly expanding compute environment. About the Role We are seeking a Hardware Technical Program Manager, Infrastructure Partner Operations to lead operational delivery across OpenAI’s third-party infrastructure partners, including major cloud service providers and strategic compute vendors. In this role, you will serve as the primary operational program manager for external infrastructure partners, driving accountability for service delivery, operational readiness, incident management, performance reporting, and continuous operational improvement. You will work closely with partner engineering and operations teams while coordinating internally across Hardware Engineering, Infrastructure Operations, Capacity Planning, Networking, Supply Chain, Deployment, Reliability Engineering, and executive leadership. Success in this role requires someone who understands how hyperscale infrastructure organizations operate, can establish strong operational governance with external partners, and is comfortable driving complex technical programs without direct ownership of the underlying infrastructure. Key Responsibilities - Own operational engagement with third-party infrastructure providers, ensuring consistent execution against operational commitments, service-level agreements (SLAs), and performance expectations. - Develop operational governance frameworks with strategic partners, including business reviews, operational scorecards, escalation processes, executive reporting, and performance improvement plans. - Define, track, and continuously improve key operational metrics related to infrastructure availability, deployment execution, incident response, operational health, service quality, and partner performance. - Build dashboards and reporting mechanisms that provide clear visibility into partner operational performance, risks, trends, and areas requiring executive attention. - Drive cross-functional coordination between OpenAI teams and external infrastructure providers to resolve operational issues, remove execution blockers, and improve delivery outcomes. - Lead operational escalations involving infrastructure availability, deployment execution, hardware operations, capacity delivery, or service performance, ensuring timely resolution and clear executive communication. - Establish repeatable operating rhythms with external partners, including weekly operational reviews, executive business reviews, service reviews, action tracking, and long-term improvement initiatives. - Partner with Capacity Planning, Hardware Operations, Networking, Deployment, Reliability Engineering, and Supply Chain teams to ensure external infrastructure providers remain aligned with OpenAI’s operational priorities. - Identify systemic operational risks across partner organizations and proactively drive corrective actions that improve long-term operational effectiveness. Qualifications - 7+ years of experience in Technical Program Management, Infrastructure Operations, Cloud Operations, Service Delivery, or Technical Account Management within large-scale infrastructure environments. - Experience managing operational relationships with external infrastructure providers, cloud service providers, hardware vendors, or strategic technology partners. - Strong understanding of hyperscale cloud infrastructure, data center operations, infrastructure delivery, or large-scale distributed systems. - Experience developing operational KPIs, SLAs, service health metrics, dashboards, and executive reporting for complex technical organizations. - Demonstrated success leading cross-functional operational programs involving both internal stakeholders and external partners. - Strong program management skills with the ability to drive accountability across organizations without direct authority. - Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience presenting operational performance to senior technical and executive leadership. - Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Operations, or equivalent practical experience. Preferred Skills - Experience managing cloud infrastructure operations within organizations such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), or other hyperscale cloud providers. - Experience leading operational governance, service delivery, customer success engineering, technical account management, or infrastructure operations for enterprise cloud customers. - Strong understanding of service-level agreements (SLAs), operational KPIs, incident management, escalation processes, root cause analysis, and continuous service improvement methodologies. - Experience building executive dashboards, operational scorecards, business review frameworks, and data-driven performance reporting. - Familiarity with infrastructure operations supporting GPU infrastructure, AI infrastructure, high-performance computing (HPC), or hyperscale data center environments. - Experience managing complex cross-company technical relationships while balancing customer priorities, engineering constraints, and operational execution. - Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders across both internal teams and external partner organizations without direct authority. - Experience driving continuous operational improvements through metrics, process optimization, and structured governance. 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. 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