New Geography and International Growth Lead

Role Description

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.

Company Description

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.
• We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.