Energy Regulatory Lead

Job description

**About the Team** OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Power Execution team owns the strategy and execution required to secure reliable, scalable, and economically resilient power for OpenAI’s global data center portfolio. The team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, policy, legal, and operational work, partnering across OpenAI and with utilities, grid operators, regulators, counterparties, and public-sector stakeholders. **About the Role** The Energy Regulatory Lead will own energy regulatory strategy and execution for OpenAI’s infrastructure growth. This role will be the primary bridge between the Power Execution team and Public Policy and Government Affairs on energy regulatory matters, ensuring that OpenAI’s external engagement is grounded in project realities and that changing policy and regulatory conditions are translated into actionable infrastructure decisions. This is an individual contributor lead role and does not have direct reports initially. The role combines portfolio-level regulatory positioning with transactional regulatory work: evaluating jurisdictional pathways, supporting utility and energy transactions, coordinating approvals and filings, and helping project teams navigate tariffs, interconnection, load-service requirements, market rules, and regulatory risk from diligence through execution. **Key Responsibilities** - Develop and maintain OpenAI’s energy regulatory strategy across priority U.S. markets and, as needed, emerging geographies for infrastructure expansion. - Coordinate closely with Public Policy and Government Affairs to shape energy regulatory priorities, engagement plans, messaging, and positions before utilities, public utility commissions, grid operators, state energy offices, and other relevant policymakers. - Translate project requirements—load size, timing, reliability, cost, carbon, and expansion needs—into clear regulatory objectives and external engagement strategies. - Lead regulatory diligence for powered-land, data center, utility, supply, and energy-infrastructure opportunities; identify applicable tariffs, service rules, approval pathways, filing requirements, queue and interconnection constraints, and material regulatory risks. - Support transactional work with Legal, Commercial, Procurement, Finance, and project teams, including regulatory review of utility service agreements, special contracts, tariff arrangements, interconnection agreements, PPAs, supply structures, and related energy transactions. - Coordinate regulatory submissions, testimony, comments, data requests, stakeholder meetings, and approval processes with internal teams, outside counsel, consultants, utilities, and other counterparties. - Monitor utility rate cases, integrated resource plans, transmission and interconnection proceedings, RTO/ISO market developments, capacity and reliability rules, and state and federal policy changes that could affect cost, schedule, reliability, or growth. - Build decision frameworks and executive-ready analyses that compare regulatory pathways, clarify tradeoffs, surface escalation points, and support go / no-go and investment decisions. - Develop durable relationships with utilities, regulators, grid operators, policymakers, industry groups, and external advisors while coordinating carefully with OpenAI’s public-policy and government-affairs owners. - Create repeatable playbooks, trackers, and governance for regulatory diligence, transaction support, approvals, and cross-functional escalation across the infrastructure portfolio. **Qualifications** - 10+ years in energy regulation, utility strategy, power markets, energy transactions, infrastructure development, or a related role. - Deep understanding of U.S. electric utility regulation, tariffs, public utility commission processes, RTO/ISO structures, transmission and interconnection, and large-load service requirements. - Experience supporting or leading regulatory work for large energy consumers, utilities, developers, data centers, generation, transmission, or other power-intensive infrastructure. - Demonstrated ability to connect policy and regulatory strategy with transaction execution, project schedules, commercial terms, and operational requirements. - Experience working with utility service agreements, special contracts, interconnection agreements, PPAs, regulatory filings, or comparable energy-infrastructure transactions. - Strong cross-functional judgment and the ability to partner effectively with Public Policy, Government Affairs, Legal, Commercial, Finance, Sustainability, Engineering, and site-readiness teams. - Excellent written communication and executive-summary skills; able to make complex regulatory issues clear, practical, and decision-ready. - Comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment and managing multiple high-stakes workstreams at once. **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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. 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