Fire Protection Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization delivers the infrastructure that powers frontier AI models. Within Infrastructure Delivery, we turn engineering concepts into safe, reliable, and operational AI campuses by working across design, construction, utilities, commissioning, operations, and external partners.

The fire protection function establishes the life-safety and property-protection strategy for these campuses. The team connects code requirements and engineering standards to practical design, construction, testing, incident readiness, and long-term operations.

About the Role

We are seeking a Fire Protection Engineer to lead owner-side fire and life-safety engineering across large-scale data center programs. You will establish design criteria, review complex fire protection systems, coordinate with authorities and delivery partners, and ensure that fire and life-safety requirements remain clear from early design through construction, commissioning, and operational handover.

This role requires strong technical judgment across detection, alarm, suppression, smoke control, water supply, emergency response, and code compliance. You will work closely with engineering, construction, safety, security, commissioning, and operations teams to resolve risks quickly without compromising life safety, reliability, or schedule.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain fire protection and life-safety design criteria, technical standards, and review requirements for self-build data center campuses.

• Review fire protection drawings, specifications, code analyses, fire and life-safety narratives, hydraulic calculations, equipment submittals, and sequences of operation across all project phases.

• Provide owner-side engineering direction for fire detection and alarm, automatic suppression, fire pumps and water storage, smoke control, emergency communication, and related life-safety systems.

• Integrate fire protection requirements with architectural, structural, electrical, mechanical, controls, security, hardware, and operational systems.

• Partner with code officials, authorities having jurisdiction, insurers, consultants, contractors, and equipment vendors to resolve code interpretations and approval risks.

• Support constructability reviews, RFIs, submittals, field inspections, deficiency resolution, and change management during active construction.

• Define commissioning, integrated-system testing, acceptance, turnover, and operational-readiness criteria for fire and life-safety systems.

• Assess fire and life-safety risks associated with high-density compute, battery and energy-storage systems, generators and fuel systems, utility infrastructure, cooling systems, hazardous materials, and construction activities.

• Support incident response, root-cause reviews, corrective actions, and lessons learned, translating operational findings into improved designs and standards.

• Maintain clear records of design decisions, code positions, approvals, testing results, open risks, and turnover requirements.

• Travel regularly to project sites to support design reviews, field execution, testing, commissioning, and operational readiness.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Fire Protection Engineering or a related engineering discipline, or equivalent practical experience delivering fire and life-safety systems.

• 8+ years of fire protection engineering experience supporting data centers, industrial facilities, advanced manufacturing, energy infrastructure, or other mission-critical environments.

• Strong knowledge of applicable building and fire codes and standards, including IBC, IFC, NFPA requirements, and local authority approval processes.

• Technical depth in fire alarm and detection, water-based suppression, special-hazard suppression, fire pumps and water supply, smoke control, egress, and integrated life-safety systems.

• Experience reviewing fire protection designs, specifications, hydraulic calculations, equipment submittals, testing procedures, and commissioning results.

• Demonstrated ability to work with authorities having jurisdiction, engineering consultants, contractors, insurers, vendors, and internal stakeholders.

• Experience resolving field issues and design changes while maintaining clear code compliance, safety, quality, schedule, and documentation.

• Strong written and verbal communication, sound engineering judgment, and the ability to create clarity when requirements or ownership are ambiguous.

• Professional Engineer licensure in Fire Protection Engineering, or the ability to obtain licensure in relevant jurisdictions.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with hyperscale data centers, high-density compute environments, or global multi-site infrastructure programs.

• Experience with battery rooms, energy-storage systems, generator plants, fuel systems, high-voltage substations, or other campus utility infrastructure.

• Familiarity with performance-based design, fire and smoke modeling, quantitative risk assessment, or fire-hazard analysis.

• Experience leading integrated testing and coordinating fire alarm, suppression, controls, security, mechanical, and electrical interfaces.

• Experience developing reusable standards, design templates, commissioning requirements, and incident-prevention programs across multiple sites.

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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