Land and Data Center Development

About the Team OpenAI’s Compute organization builds the infrastructure that powers frontier AI training and inference. This work brings together commercial, technical, strategy, and operations teams to secure and develop the sites and capacity needed for large-scale compute deployment. We partner across real estate, power, engineering, legal, finance, and delivery to connect infrastructure needs with viable development opportunities and executable commercial agreements. About the Role We’re looking for a commercial real estate (CRE) development professional to help secure land and data-center capacity for OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. This is a combined role spanning land acquisition and development, data-center leasing, and real estate acquisitions. The ideal candidate is particularly strong in land and can also contribute across data-center transactions. You’ll source and evaluate opportunities, structure and negotiate agreements, and coordinate commercial and technical diligence. Working with legal, finance, engineering, and development partners, you’ll connect transaction decisions with infrastructure requirements and carry opportunities through agreement execution and handoff. Responsibilities - Lead sourcing, evaluation, and commercial execution of land acquisition opportunities for data-center development. - Support data-center leasing and real estate acquisitions, working across land and data-center transactions as priorities require. - Build relationships with landowners, brokers, developers, and data-center counterparties to source opportunities. - Structure and negotiate land acquisition, site-control, and data-center lease agreements with legal and business partners. - Coordinate diligence with legal, finance, engineering, and development partners, translating site constraints and readiness risks into commercial decisions. - Evaluate deal economics and present clear recommendations on costs, terms, tradeoffs, and next steps. - Manage the transaction pipeline, keep stakeholders aligned, and resolve issues that affect decisions and execution. - Drive transactions through agreement execution and coordinate clear handoffs to the teams responsible for development and delivery. Qualifications - Strong commercial real estate development experience, with depth in land acquisition, site control, and development feasibility. - A record of sourcing, structuring, and negotiating complex real estate agreements. - Ability to work across land transactions and data-center leasing, with sound judgment about their different commercial and development requirements. - Sound commercial judgment and the ability to assess deal economics, identify risks, and make practical recommendations. - Experience working across legal, finance, engineering, and operations teams to move transactions forward. - Clear communication and strong ownership of complex negotiations, competing priorities, and uncertain timelines. 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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