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OpenAI is now hiring civil site designers to lay out grading, drainage, roads, and utilities for its own data center campuses, including gas metering, battery storage, and substations, which signals that the company is building and owning physical power and compute infrastructure at a scale that resembles a utility developer more than a software firm.
About the Team
Industrial Compute develops the infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s AI systems. Our Design organization connects engineering, construction, and digital delivery to support complex data center campuses from initial planning through deployment.
Working with internal teams, design consultants, and construction partners, we develop coordinated designs that address site constraints, infrastructure requirements, and future growth. Our BIM team provides the models and workflows needed to deliver consistently across the portfolio.
About the Role
We are seeking a hands-on Civil BIM Designer & Coordinator with a minimum of 8 years of relevant experience to support the planning and design of large-scale, mission-critical data center campuses and associated power generation, energy storage, and utility facilities.
In this role, you will develop, coordinate, and maintain civil models using Civil 3D and AutoCAD. Your scope will include site layouts, grading, drainage, roads, and utilities, coordinating buildings with generating equipment, battery energy storage systems (BESS), water treatment plants, gas metering and conditioning facilities, substations, and cooling systems.
You will work closely with civil engineers, BIM team, discipline designers, equipment vendors, and delivery partners to turn engineering requirements into clear models and deliverables. Your work will support early design reviews, resolve site coordination challenges, and establish repeatable civil BIM practices across concurrent projects. Detailed engineering requirements and specialist analyses will be provided by the responsible engineers.
We are looking for a hands-on civil specialist who can independently manage modeling assignments, communicate design dependencies, and maintain quality as projects evolve.
Key Responsibilities
Advance feasibility, constructability, and phasing: Prepare layout, grading, routing, and earthwork options for early design reviews; incorporate noise, exhaust dispersion, heat-rejection, safety, and environmental constraints. Model heavy-equipment delivery routes, turning movements, crane areas, laydown, maintenance clearances, staged construction, temporary-to-permanent generation transitions, and future expansion.
Lead civil site development: Create and maintain surfaces, grading and earthwork models, equipment and building pads, roads, alignments, profiles, and corridors. Incorporate flood protection, stormwater management, and containment or separation process-drainage requirements.
Develop and coordinate plant utility systems: Model gravity and pressure networks for gas supply, cooling and process water, fire water, wastewater, electrical duct banks, and communications. Coordinate utility models, routes, corridors, crossings, connections, and clearances with engineers, consultants, utility providers, vendors, and construction partners.
Integrate campus and power-generation infrastructure: Coordinate civil models with buildings, power plants, BESS, substations, water treatment plants, gas metering and conditioning facilities, cooling systems, and other site utilities. Support simple-cycle and combined-cycle gas turbine, reciprocating engine, and CHP layouts while incorporating equipment separation, service access, and fire access.
Coordinate equipment, foundation, and thermal interfaces: Integrate vendor general arrangements, foundation footprints, equipment elevations, trenches, pits, and pipe-support locations with inputs from structural, geotechnical, mechanical, and electrical engineers. Coordinate civil interfaces for heat-recovery steam generators, steam-turbine facilities, heat exchangers, cooling towers, air-cooled condensers, radiator arrays, and thermal-distribution corridors.
Govern civil model data and multidisciplinary alignment: Manage Civil 3D data shortcuts, external references, coordinate systems, styles, templates, and parts libraries. Coordinate Civil 3D, Revit, vendor, and combined-discipline models; verify coordinates, origins, elevations, units, orientation, and model alignment in Navisworks.
Drive coordination and quality: Lead model reviews, investigate clashes and spatial conflicts, communicate design changes, and track issues through resolution. Review civil models and drawings for completeness, reference integrity, consistency, and compliance with project BIM requirements.
Deliver and improve civil BIM: Prepare plans, profiles, sections, model exports, review packages, and model-based quantities appropriate to each project phase. Maintain reusable content, document workflows, and improve delivery across data center, power-generation, energy-storage, and utility projects.
Qualifications
Minimum 8 years of civil design, BIM modeling, or civil infrastructure drafting experience, plus a relevant degree/diploma or equivalent practical experience.
Experience supporting mission-critical facilities or complex industrial infrastructure across multiple disciplines.
Advanced Civil 3D and AutoCAD proficiency, including grading, corridors, utility networks, sheet production, data shortcuts, references, coordinate systems, and model dependencies.
Experience with site-survey data, GIS, point clouds, NavVis or similar laser-scanning/reality-capture workflows.
Experience with Navisworks, Revizto, and Autodesk Forma for model coordination, issue tracking, and markups.
Ability to independently deliver civil packages, interpret engineering and vendor information, identify missing inputs, and escalate engineering decisions appropriately.
Strong communication and organizational skills across changing priorities and concurrent projects.
Preferred Skills
Direct experience with hyperscale, colocation, or other mission-critical data center campuses, from conceptual site planning through detailed design and construction coordination.
Experience supporting civil design and model coordination for one or more of the following: gas turbine or reciprocating engine power plants, combined-cycle or CHP facilities, BESS installations, water treatment plants, gas metering and conditioning facilities, or comparable industrial infrastructure.
Familiarity with OEM installation requirements, equipment and foundation interfaces, maintenance envelopes, and balance-of-plant infrastructure.
Familiarity with Revit-to-Civil 3D workflows, including building locations, elevations, utility interfaces, and phased campus development.
Experience with GIS, survey data, point clouds, and civil data exchange workflows.
Experience reviewing consultant models, BIM execution plans, levels of development, model quality, and common data environments.
Experience improving production through Dynamo, scripting, or other automation tools.
For candidates with deeper experience, the ability to guide complex civil modeling packages, mentor colleagues, and improve shared standards.
What Success Looks Like
You deliver dependable civil models and drawings, identify coordination issues early, and maintain clear ownership of civil BIM production and standards. Your work enables coordinated delivery of data center campuses and associated power, energy storage, and utility infrastructure across the portfolio.
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.
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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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