Fire Protection Engineer

The role

You will lead owner-side fire and life-safety engineering for large-scale data center programs. You will establish design criteria, review systems, and coordinate with authorities and delivery partners from design through operational handover.

What you will do

• Develop and maintain fire protection and life-safety design criteria and technical standards.
• Review fire protection drawings, specifications, code analyses, and hydraulic calculations.
• Provide owner-side engineering direction for fire detection, alarm, suppression, and smoke control.
• Integrate fire protection requirements with architectural, structural, electrical, and mechanical systems.
• Partner with code officials, authorities, insurers, consultants, and contractors.
• Support constructability reviews, RFIs, submittals, and field inspections during construction.
• Define commissioning, integrated-system testing, and operational-readiness criteria.
• Assess fire and life-safety risks for high-density compute, energy-storage, and utility infrastructure.
• Support incident response, root-cause reviews, and corrective actions.
• Maintain records of design decisions, code positions, and testing results.

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Fire Protection Engineering or a related engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of fire protection engineering experience supporting data centers, industrial facilities, advanced manufacturing, energy infrastructure, or other mission-critical environments.
• Strong knowledge of building and fire codes and standards, including IBC, IFC, and NFPA requirements.
• Technical depth in fire alarm, detection, water-based suppression, special-hazard suppression, fire pumps, and smoke control.
• Experience reviewing fire protection designs, specifications, hydraulic calculations, and commissioning results.
• Ability to work with authorities having jurisdiction, engineering consultants, contractors, and insurers.
• Experience resolving field issues and design changes.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
• Professional Engineer licensure in Fire Protection Engineering, or the ability to obtain licensure in relevant jurisdictions.

Nice to have

• Experience with hyperscale data centers, high-density compute environments, or global multi-site infrastructure programs.
• Experience with battery rooms, energy-storage systems, generator plants, fuel systems, or high-voltage substations.
• Familiarity with performance-based design, fire and smoke modeling, quantitative risk assessment, or fire-hazard analysis.
• Experience leading integrated testing and coordinating multiple system interfaces.
• Experience developing reusable standards, design templates, and incident-prevention programs.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.