New Geography and International Growth Lead

Job description

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Stargate team is central to this mission, setting the core infra strategy and implementing this vision. From site selection to the buildout process, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, strategy, and operations, interacting with teams and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. About the Role The New Geography and International Growth Lead will own the strategy for infrastructure expansion into new geographies, including market assessment, stakeholder engagement, and coordination across energy, policy, commercial, and other infrastructure workstreams. This role identifies and enables priority international growth opportunities while ensuring alignment with regional regulatory, operational, sustainability, and long-term infrastructure objectives. This is an individual contributor lead role and does not have direct reports initially. The role will translate ambiguous market-entry questions into clear recommendations, identify the conditions required for OpenAI to advance in new regions, and coordinate the cross-functional work needed to turn priority geographies into executable infrastructure options. Key Responsibilities - Build market-entry frameworks for international infrastructure geographies, including power availability, land readiness, regulatory posture, commercial fit, and execution risk. - Assess priority regions and countries against OpenAI’s long-term compute, energy, sustainability, policy, and operational objectives. - Coordinate cross-functional geographic diligence with energy, policy, commercial, legal, finance, procurement, engineering, and site-readiness stakeholders. - Lead early stakeholder mapping and engagement strategy with utilities, regulators, government entities, developers, capital partners, and other market participants. - Translate regional findings into executive-ready recommendations, including go / no-go decisions, gating risks, required partnerships, and sequencing options. - Identify market, regulatory, land-control, permitting, community, and operating dependencies that could affect speed, scale, cost, or strategic fit. - Partner with energy regulatory and policy teams to align geography strategy with OpenAI’s broader external engagement and infrastructure narrative. - Build repeatable playbooks, decision criteria, and tracking mechanisms for evaluating and activating new geographies. Qualifications - 8+ years in infrastructure strategy, site selection, energy, data centers, economic development, corporate development, international expansion, or related roles. - Experience evaluating new markets or geographies for large-scale infrastructure, technology, energy, or real estate development. - Strong understanding of how power, land, policy, permitting, commercial structure, and operating constraints shape infrastructure expansion decisions. - Proven ability to coordinate complex cross-functional workstreams and synthesize ambiguous inputs into clear recommendations. - Comfort operating across jurisdictions, external stakeholders, and fast-changing policy or regulatory environments. - Excellent executive communication, analytical judgment, and documentation skills. 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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