Datacenter Hardware Operations Technician, AI Compute Infrastructure

About The Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Our Stargate program develops and deploys massive, state-of-the-art data center campuses in partnership with industry leaders such as Oracle today—and through future OpenAI infrastructure projects tomorrow. We design for scale, speed, and reliability, and we need experienced hardware professionals who can help ensure our high-density compute environment operates at peak performance.

About The Role

We are seeking a senior Datacenter Hardware Operations Technician to coordinate physical hardware activities at a large partner-operated campus. In this role you will work side-by-side with Oracle and their delivery teams, helping align OpenAI’s compute requirements with day-to-day hardware work on the ground. Rather than directing partner personnel, you will focus on collaboration, technical alignment, and shared problem solving, ensuring that maintenance, repairs, and lifecycle activities support the performance and reliability goals of both organizations. As the campus matures, you will help capture lessons learned and develop standards and playbooks to guide hardware operations at future OpenAI infrastructure projects.

Candidates must be able to sit onsite in Abilene, Texas 5 days per week.

In This Role You Will

• Serve as OpenAI’s primary on-site hardware contact, collaborating with Oracle teams and vendors to plan and coordinate maintenance, repairs, and lifecycle activities.
• Share technical requirements and verify that work performed supports OpenAI’s compute needs and agreed quality targets.
• Coordinate schedules, spare-parts planning, and issue escalation with partner teams to minimize downtime and keep operations running smoothly.
• Work with OpenAI fleet-health engineers to translate software-detected issues into on-site hardware actions in partnership with Oracle.
• Track hardware trends and provide joint recommendations with partner teams for design or operational improvements.
• Prepare documentation and runbooks that capture joint best practices and can be applied at additional campuses.
• Offer technical guidance and context to partner personnel while respecting their operational ownership.
• Collaborate with supply-chain teams to plan spares and manage hardware lifecycle activities.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 7+ years of experience in datacenter hardware operations, hardware engineering, or large-scale server maintenance, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead technician capacity.
• Bring deep knowledge of high-density server hardware, including x86 platforms, GPUs, storage devices, and power/cooling systems.
• Excel at diagnosing hardware issues, coordinating complex repairs, and maintaining strong working relationships across organizations.
• Are comfortable setting technical expectations and validating outcomes through collaboration, not direct management.
• Adapt quickly to changing operational conditions and enjoy solving problems at both the strategic and on-site levels.
• Communicate clearly and build trust across partner teams, vendors, and internal engineering stakeholders.
• Are willing to be based full-time at a partner-operated campus.

Preferred Skills

• Familiarity with large-scale cluster management or monitoring tools (IPMI, BMC, Prometheus, Nagios) to interpret alerts and coordinate partner responses.
• Experience with GPU-accelerated compute clusters or other high-performance computing hardware.
• Knowledge of Linux/Unix system administration and command-line diagnostic tools for hardware validation.
• Industry certifications such as CompTIA Server+, OEM hardware certifications, or equivalent.
• Experience applying Environmental Health and Safety best practices in mission-critical environments.

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.

Key skills/competency

• Datacenter operations
• Hardware engineering
• High-density servers
• GPU clusters
• x86 platforms
• Linux administration
• IPMI
• BMC
• Prometheus
• Nagios