Economic Development Lead

About the Team

OpenAI is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Site Readiness & Development team owns the upstream diligence and development work required to convert powered-land opportunities into executable infrastructure options.

About the Role

The Economic Development Lead works upstream across the national pipeline, beginning engagement before a project is public and helping shape the incentive, relationship, community-benefit, and approval strategy for sites under evaluation. This role enters early during site evaluation and deal formation; once a project moves toward announcement, the dedicated Community Engagement Lead becomes the local owner while the Economic Development Lead continues to support agreement-linked commitments and incentive execution.

Key Responsibilities

• Own incentive strategy and negotiations.

• Build local and state economic-development relationships.

• Develop community-benefit commitments tied to project agreements.

• Coordinate with Site Selection, Land, Power, Legal, Finance, and Community Engagement.

• Identify political, commercial, and approval risks early.

• Transition local relationships and commitments to the assigned Community Engagement Lead as a project moves toward announcement.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in economic development, public-private partnerships, infrastructure development, government affairs, or a related field.

• Experience structuring and negotiating incentive packages for large infrastructure, energy, technology, or real estate projects.

• Strong relationships and judgment across local, state, and regional economic-development stakeholders.

• Ability to connect incentives, community benefits, legal commitments, project economics, and approval risk.

• Excellent cross-functional coordination, negotiation, and executive-communication skills.

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.

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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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