Power Trading Lead

About the Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Power & Land team owns the energy strategy required to secure reliable, scalable, and economically resilient power for OpenAI’s global data center portfolio.

About the Role

The Power Trading Lead will own commodity hedging strategy and execution across OpenAI’s data center power portfolio. This role will translate large, dynamic electricity and fuel exposures into practical hedging, procurement, and risk-management strategies that protect infrastructure economics while preserving flexibility for growth.

This is an individual contributor lead role and does not have direct reports initially. The role will work across power markets, utility tariffs, retail and wholesale supply structures, natural gas and power hedges, renewable and clean firm products, and portfolio risk analytics to support long-term compute growth.

Key Responsibilities

- Develop and maintain OpenAI’s commodity hedging strategy across electricity, natural gas, and related energy exposures for data center operations and growth.

- Quantify portfolio exposure by market, site, load shape, tenor, tariff, and supply structure, and translate that exposure into clear hedging recommendations.

- Evaluate and execute hedging structures including fixed-price supply, forwards, swaps, options, retail supply products, congestion and basis risk mitigation, and related instruments where appropriate.

- Partner with utilities, suppliers, traders, banks, consultants, and market counterparties to source competitive products and improve risk-adjusted energy economics.

- Build decision frameworks for when to hedge, how much to hedge, and which risks to retain across different stages of site development, construction, and operations.

- Coordinate with finance, treasury, legal, procurement, energy regulatory, sustainability, and site-readiness teams to ensure hedging strategy aligns with broader infrastructure objectives.

- Monitor wholesale power markets, gas markets, congestion, basis, capacity, ancillary services, tariff developments, and regulatory changes that could affect portfolio cost or reliability.

- Produce executive-ready analyses on commodity risk, hedge performance, downside scenarios, and recommended actions.

- Help build repeatable governance, controls, reporting, and playbooks for commodity risk management across the infrastructure portfolio.

Qualifications

- 10+ years in power trading, energy procurement, commodity risk management, utility strategy, energy markets, or related roles.

- Deep understanding of U.S. wholesale power markets, retail supply structures, utility tariffs, congestion and basis risk, capacity, and natural gas market linkages.

- Experience designing or executing hedging strategies for large energy consumers, generators, utilities, data centers, or other power-intensive infrastructure.

- Strong analytical ability to translate complex market exposure into clear commercial, financial, and executive recommendations.

- Experience working with ISDAs, supply contracts, risk limits, approvals, and internal controls is a plus.

- Strong cross-functional communication skills and comfort operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment.

- Excellent judgment, documentation, and executive-summary skills.