OpenAI

Technical Program Manager, Core Network & WAN Infrastructure

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Telecommunications & Hardware
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in infrastructure, networking, or cloud operations
  • Strong understanding of WAN and backbone infrastructure
  • Experience managing cross-functional projects with ambiguous requirements
  • Proficient in collaborating with technical and non-technical teams
  • Exceptional written communication skills for tracking and escalation
  • Practical and self-driven with a focus on execution and operational improvement
  • Comfortable with detailed technical documentation and analysis

Responsibilities

  • Own execution of PoP buildouts and network capacity delivery
  • Drive physical and logical network readiness across various components
  • Maintain ownership of timelines, dependencies, and readiness milestones
  • Translate deployment plans into actionable workstreams with clear criteria
  • Partner with engineers to validate network performance and readiness
  • Ensure vendors have all necessary operational instructions
  • Develop standard operating procedures and deployment trackers
  • Identify and address bottlenecks in future builds for efficiency

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week
  • Relocation assistance for new employees
  • Opportunity to work on cutting-edge WAN infrastructure projects
  • Collaborative team environment with cross-functional roles
  • Potential for personal and professional growth within a tech-forward company
Full Job Description
About the Role

You will join an engineer-first TPM team and own end-to-end delivery of OpenAI's WAN Infrastructure, partnering with engineers to bring clusters online across external providers and partners.

This is a hands-on infrastructure execution role. You'll run a broad, parallel portfolio spanning hardware, cabling, optics, cloud cross-connects, and port maps-driving execution, risk management, and crisp alignment from working teams through leadership to deliver production-ready capacity at scale.

The right person combines enough technical depth to reason through physical and logical network readiness with the program discipline and ownership to keep complex builds moving and improve how we scale.

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.

In this role, you will:
  • Lead end-to-end delivery of OpenAI's WAN build-out and large-scale GPU clusters across an external partner ecosystem
  • Drive multi-threaded network infrastructure bring-up programs across physical and logical readiness-owning plans, dependencies, and critical paths
  • Partner with engineering to turn up large-scale network capacity, reducing bring-up time for our largest GPU supercomputers by working across optics, circuits
  • Identify recurring bottlenecks in WAN and network infrastructure build-out, then drive fixes that make future builds faster, more predictable, and less dependent on tribal knowledge
  • Coordinate cross-functional readiness (security, finance, operations, product/research stakeholders) to ship production-ready compute
  • Manage integration and handoffs across teams and partners-ensuring consistent execution, clear communication, and fast issue resolution
  • Identify bottlenecks and systemic gaps, then drive durable fixes across tooling, process, and partner interfaces
  • Provide crisp executive visibility on progress, tradeoffs, and risks across a large portfolio of concurrent programs

You might thrive in this role if you have:
  • Possess a degree in a hard science, or have a demonstrated track record of engineering expertise.
  • Have 5+ years of experience in program management for major projects including capital projects or hyperscaler infrastructure deployment.
  • Are relentlessly resourceful and thrive in ambiguous, fast-paced environments
  • Demonstrate the ability to serve as the go-to person solely responsible for driving and delivering complex projects.
  • Strong technical intuition across physical networking, WAN/backbone infrastructure, colocation environments, cloud interconnects, cross-connects, optics, cabling, routing, and operational readiness.
  • Have experience interfacing with and leading external vendors including engineering firms, equipment suppliers, and/or construction firms.
  • Have expertise in designing and implementing simple, scalable processes that solve complex problems.
  • Have experience managing complicated dependencies such as logistics and/or supply chains.


About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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