White Space Manager, Network & Data Halls

The role

The White Space Manager owns the planning, coordination, and readiness of data center white-space environments. This person connects facility delivery with compute deployment by coordinating rack layouts, electrical distribution, cooling, and installation sequencing.

What you will do

• Own white-space planning and readiness from design development through rack installation, testing, activation, and handoff to operations.
• Coordinate rack elevations, floor layouts, service clearances, containment, busway or RPP distribution, cabling pathways, and cooling connections.
• Translate compute deployment forecasts into space, power, cooling, network, labor, tooling, and material requirements.
• Develop installation sequences, readiness gates, turnover criteria, punch-list processes, and escalation paths across multiple workstreams.
• Partner with design, construction, commissioning, networking, hardware operations, safety, logistics, and vendors to resolve cross-system constraints.
• Verify field conditions against approved designs and maintain accurate as-built, capacity, asset, and readiness records.
• Identify risks to safe installation, energization, cooling availability, network readiness, or schedule and drive mitigations to closure.
• Create repeatable white-space standards, checklists, metrics, and operating mechanisms that scale across campuses.

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience delivering or operating data center white space, critical facilities, compute deployments, or mission-critical fit-outs.
• Strong understanding of racks, power distribution, structured cabling, airflow management, liquid cooling, controls interfaces, and deployment sequencing.
• Demonstrated ownership of installation readiness, field coordination, quality, safety, and handoff across several technical disciplines.
• Experience interpreting construction documents, rack layouts, one-lines, mechanical diagrams, schedules, and commissioning records.
• Ability to manage competing dependencies and make sound decisions in an active construction or production environment.
• Strong communication with engineers, contractors, vendors, deployment teams, and operations leaders.
• Willingness to travel regularly and spend sustained time at active project sites.

Nice to have

• Experience with high-density GPU or AI infrastructure and direct-to-chip liquid cooling.
• Experience with DCIM, asset-management, commissioning, or deployment-readiness systems.
• Background in data center construction, commissioning, hardware deployment, or facilities operations.
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, construction management, operations, or a related technical field.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Data Center Engineering team defines repeatable technical standards to deliver reliable capacity at unprecedented scale and speed.