Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Environmental Lead role stands out in the SaaS landscape because it reflects how software companies operating large-scale AI infrastructure are increasingly accountable for the physical footprint behind cloud-delivered products. Rather than treating environmental work as downstream compliance, the remit is positioned alongside site selection and development decisions, which is becoming a defining capability for infrastructure-heavy SaaS and AI platforms.
For SaaS professionals, the career value lies in learning how non-software constraints shape product availability, reliability, and long-term operating models. The work connects regulatory strategy, risk screening, and third-party governance with the kind of portfolio thinking more common in platform operations. Experience translating environmental findings into commercial and scheduling decisions is also broadly portable across SaaS organizations that depend on data centers, energy procurement, and complex vendor ecosystems.
This role is best suited to someone who prefers ownership without a large initial team and is comfortable influencing outcomes through standards, audits, and partner management. It will fit a professional who enjoys multidisciplinary collaboration across engineering, power, and site development, and who wants a SaaS-adjacent path that remains technical, decision-oriented, and grounded in real-world constraints.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About OpenAI
OpenAI is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure platform. Through the Industrial program, we are developing a global portfolio of next-generation data center campuses that integrate power, land, water, fiber, and community systems into resilient, long-term AI infrastructure.
The Site Development & Readiness organization ensures that every location we advance is technically buildable, commercially viable, environmentally sound, and supported by the communities in which we operate. Environmental and community performance are treated as first-order constraints, not downstream compliance activities.
About the Role
The Environmental & Community Stewardship Lead owns how OpenAI evaluates, governs, and delivers environmental and community performance across its global data center portfolio.
This role sets OpenAI’s environmental standards, oversees third-party developers and consultants, leads early-stage environmental risk screening, and ensures projects meet both regulatory requirements and OpenAI’s long-term stewardship commitments. The role plays a central part in determining which sites OpenAI advances, how they are permitted, and how they are received by host communities.
This is an individual contributor lead role and does not have direct reports initially. The role spans the full environmental lifecycle from site selection through permitting, construction, early operations, and long-term stewardship.
Key Responsibilities:
You will design and deliver community-aligned environmental programs that improve permitting outcomes, strengthen local trust, and provide high-impact, cost-effective benefits to host communities.
You will lead environmental diligence and risk assessment across prospective sites, including wetlands, water supply, floodplains, endangered species, cultural resources, stormwater, air, noise, and construction impacts, translating findings into commercial, schedule, and development decisions.
You will manage site-level environmental investigations and liability review, including Phase I / Phase II ESAs, noise studies, archaeological and cultural-resource reviews, and brownfield or acquired-property environmental liability assessment where relevant.
You will establish and enforce OpenAI’s environmental and community standards across land developers, utilities, EPCs, and joint-venture partners, including auditing third-party studies, mitigation plans, and construction practices to ensure alignment with OpenAI’s long-term operating model.
You will lead environmental and permitting strategies across federal, state, and local agencies, including NEPA, USACE Section 404, state wetlands, stormwater, air, water, and waste, sequencing approvals to support development schedules and operations.
You will oversee environmental compliance during construction and early operations, including stormwater (SWPPP), spill prevention (SPCC), hazardous materials, PFAS, and related field programs.
You will partner closely with internal teams across site selection, power, engineering, and community affairs to integrate environmental and community considerations into every stage of project development.
Qualifications:
8+ years of experience in environmental permitting, infrastructure development, energy, or large-scale project delivery, with hands-on experience navigating complex federal and state regulatory frameworks.
Managed environmental consultants, developers, and regulators on politically visible, multi-stakeholder projects and are comfortable setting standards, holding partners accountable, and making difficult calls when risks are too high.
Understand how environmental risk translates into financial, schedule, and reputational risk, and you know how to design mitigation strategies that are practical, cost-effective, and credible with both regulators and communities.
Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and can balance long-term stewardship with the need to deliver large-scale infrastructure on aggressive timelines.
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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