Power Generation Design Engineer, Electrical & Mechanical

About the Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital and delivery partners, is building the infrastructure required to support frontier AI systems. The Data Center Engineering team defines repeatable technical standards and carries them through design, construction, commissioning, and operational readiness. The team works across data center facilities, power generation, compute infrastructure, construction, procurement, and operations to deliver reliable capacity at unprecedented scale and speed.

About the Role

We are seeking a Power Generation Design Engineer to help design and integrate generation plants and balance-of-plant systems for large AI data center campuses. This role spans electrical and mechanical systems, including generation equipment, campus and grid interfaces, fuel and auxiliary systems, cooling, controls, and data center loads.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in either electrical or mechanical engineering, along with the cross-disciplinary judgment to evaluate how the full plant operates as an integrated system. You will establish technical requirements, assess vendor and EPC solutions, resolve design interfaces, and carry systems from concept through commissioning and validated operation.

Travel: 50%

Responsibilities

• Develop and review generation-plant basis-of-design documents, design criteria, specifications, diagrams, calculations, and reference architectures.

• Define and coordinate interfaces among generation equipment, substations, campus distribution, grid connections, fuel systems, cooling, controls, and data center loads.

• Evaluate generation technologies and operating modes, including grid-connected and islanded operation, synchronization, load sharing, black start, and restoration.

• Lead or review discipline-specific engineering analyses. Electrical studies may include load flow, short circuit, arc flash, protection coordination, transient, grounding, and motor starting. Mechanical analyses may include thermal performance, hydraulics, pressure drop, ventilation, vibration, acoustics, and heat recovery.

• Review OEM and EPC proposals, equipment ratings and performance data, operating envelopes, failure modes, test plans, maintenance strategies, and lifecycle tradeoffs.

• Translate data center load profiles and operating requirements into generation-system capacity, redundancy, performance, and control requirements.

• Coordinate with electrical, mechanical, controls, CSA, fuel, utility, environmental, fire-protection, and data center engineering teams to resolve design and delivery interfaces.

• Support procurement, factory acceptance testing, construction, startup, energization, commissioning, performance testing, and root-cause investigations.

• Develop repeatable technical standards and reference designs that improve reliability, maintainability, and deployment speed across future projects.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience in power generation, utilities, industrial systems, microgrids, oil and gas, or mission-critical infrastructure.

• Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or a related field.

• Deep technical expertise in either electrical power systems or mechanical/process systems, with experience collaborating across the other discipline.

• Electrical expertise may include generators, transformers, HV/MV switchgear, protection and controls, grounding, auxiliary power, grid interconnection, and power-system studies.

• Mechanical expertise may include rotating equipment, fuel and fluid systems, piping, heat transfer, cooling, ventilation, lubrication, water treatment, exhaust, and mechanical auxiliaries.

• Experience evaluating OEM data, equipment performance, operating scenarios, failure modes, and maintenance requirements.

• Experience carrying engineering designs through construction, startup, commissioning, and operational validation.

• Ability to communicate technical risks and tradeoffs clearly across engineering, vendors, construction, and operations.

Preferred Skills

• Professional Engineer license.

• Experience with gas turbines, reciprocating engines, battery systems, combined heat and power, heat recovery, or hybrid generation plants.

• Familiarity with relevant codes and standards, including NEC, NFPA, IEEE, NERC, ASME, API, ASHRAE, and utility requirements.

• Proficiency with applicable analysis or modeling tools, such as ETAP, PSCAD, PSS/E, SKM, EasyPower, process simulation, hydraulic modeling, or CFD.

• Experience supporting high-density data center loads and rapidly changing AI compute demand.

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.

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.

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