Data Center Controls Network Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI is building the infrastructure foundation for the next generation of AI. The Data Center Engineering team defines the strategy, reference architectures, technical requirements, and delivery standards for the large-scale data centers that support OpenAI research, products, and infrastructure partners.

As a Data Center Controls Network Engineer, you will design, validate, and scale the controls and OT network architectures that support high-density AI data centers. You will work across controls systems, OT infrastructure, telemetry, commissioning, deployment, and operations, partnering with mechanical, electrical, IT/networking, security, and external delivery teams.

About the Role

We are seeking a mid to senior OT Network Engineer with a strong controls systems background to lead the design and operation of resilient, secure, and scalable OT network architectures for high-density AI data centers. This role translates compute, power, cooling, and operational requirements into practical OT network designs, evaluates vendor solutions, and drives technical decisions across controls infrastructure, telemetry, commissioning, and operations.

The ideal candidate has strong hands-on experience in mission-critical OT environments, including industrial networking, virtualized infrastructure, and OT network operations, with expertise in routing, switching, segmentation, firewall policy, time synchronization, monitoring, and network lifecycle support.

Key Responsibilities

Define controls, automation, and OT network requirements for AI data center campuses.

Develop reference architectures, engineering standards, and reusable design templates.

Review and develop basis-of-design and functional design documents, including OT network diagrams, IP/VLAN schemes, telemetry architectures, data flow diagrams, and commissioning requirements.

Design OT and infrastructure network architectures, including physical topology, logical topology, IP addressing, subnetting, VLANs, routing, switching, redundancy, segmentation, firewall policy coordination, out-of-band management, monitoring, and remote access patterns.

Develop day-two network operations requirements, including change management, configuration backups, golden configurations, monitoring thresholds, firmware lifecycle, rollback plans, and post-change validation.

Partner with electrical, mechanical, IT/networking, security, and operations teams to ensure OT network systems align with GPU deployments, campus-wide telemetry, and failure-domain isolation requirements.

Define integration patterns and protocol requirements across BACnet/IP, BACnet MSTP, Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC UA, IEC-61850 MMS/GOOSE, MQTT, SNMP, syslog, NTP/PTP, IRIG-B, and vendor-specific interfaces.

Lead technical evaluation of controls integrators, network equipment suppliers, design consultants, contractors, and commissioning agents

Review network equipment submittals, configurations, firmware assumptions, certifications, test reports, and quality documentation.

Support factory witnessed testing (FWT), site acceptance testing, network readiness checks, failover testing, and integrated systems testing.

Troubleshoot complex controls network issues including packet loss, latency, duplicate IPs, routing errors, firewall drops, protocol incompatibilities, time synchronization drift, and intermittent device communication failures.

Qualifications

8+ years of relevant experience in controls engineering, industrial automation, OT networking, mission-critical facilities, or similar critical infrastructure environments.

Strong expertise in resilient OT network architecture, implementation, troubleshooting, and lifecycle support.

Experience with OT/IT boundary design, secure enterprise integration, firewall policy design, redundant topologies, out-of-band management, and monitoring.

Hands-on experience with Layer 3 OT network design, including IP addressing, subnetting, routing, VRFs, ACLs, inter-VLAN traffic control, and network segmentation.

Hands-on experience with Layer 2 security and switching controls, including MACsec, port security, loop prevention, and switch-level access control.