Host Systems Software Engineer

About the Team Frontier Systems Foundations, part of Compute Foundations at OpenAI, builds the systems software foundation that turns new compute infrastructure into reliable, usable capacity for frontier model training. Our mission is to make some of the world's largest GPU clusters work reliably for frontier training. We bring new platforms and clusters online, safely maintain installed fleets, and partner with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to resolve the system-level issues that keep jobs from running. That means building and maintaining the software closest to the machine: Linux and Ubuntu operating-system images, kernels and modules, drivers, packages and repositories, disks and boot configuration, firmware integration, provisioning, and system-level validation. We make these components reproducible, compatible, and safe to operate across heterogeneous fleets. About the Role We are looking for systems software engineers with deep Linux and host-systems experience to build, qualify, and maintain the operating-system foundation for OpenAI's frontier compute fleet. Relevant backgrounds include kernel and module development, Linux distribution or image engineering, package management, firmware and driver integration, disks and boot, and bare-metal provisioning. You'll work closely with hardware engineers, vendors, and infrastructure teams to bring up new platforms, integrate system components, and debug failures across firmware, disks, boot, operating systems, kernels, drivers, and workload interactions. Your work will directly influence how quickly new capacity becomes usable and how reliably large GPU fleets operate. You should be comfortable writing and maintaining production-quality systems software and automation, but we do not expect expertise across every layer. This is an opportunity to go deep on challenging systems problems while building the image, package, qualification, and recovery paths that power the next generation of frontier models

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We're seeking a System Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will design, build, integrate, and validate low-level system software for the manageability and health of OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems. You will work across BMC, Linux, firmware interfaces, automation infra, boot and recovery, hardware diagnostics, telemetry, host and platform drivers, network software interfaces, and manufacturing and fleet readiness. A major part of this role is owning the acceptance path for partner-delivered system software: defining requirements, reviewing code and artifacts, reproducing builds, building tests, pushing fixes, and producing the evidence needed for launch decisions. This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will write and review low-level software, debug issues across hardware and software boundaries, build infra and automation to test and manage devices in lab, guide partner deliverables, build validation evidence, and help carry platforms from bring-up through production deployment. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Design, develop, and maintain low-level firmware and system software for first-party AI hardware manageability, including BMC software, Redfish services, gNMI telemetry, firmware update and recovery flows, BIOS/UEFI interactions, platform drivers, and hardware diagnostics. Own integration and acceptance of partner and ve

About the Team The Core Network Engineering team owns the end-to-end networking stack that connects OpenAI’s compute infrastructure — spanning global WAN/edge connectivity, data-center networking, and high-performance host/xPU networking used for large-scale training and inference workloads. This team is responsible for ensuring networking is never the bottleneck to model training efficiency, cluster reliability, or fleet expansion. They design and operate the systems that provide predictable, high-throughput, low-latency connectivity across some of the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure. About the Role We’re looking for engineers to help build and operate the networking foundation behind OpenAI’s frontier AI systems. Depending on your background and area of focus, you may work across host networking, datacenter fabrics, or global WAN infrastructure. The problems span low-level systems software, distributed infrastructure, protocol readiness, observability, performance engineering, automation, and large-scale network operations. You’ll work on systems where microseconds of latency, tail performance, and network reliability directly impact model training efficiency and production serving performance. This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy operating close to the hardware/software boundary and solving performance-critical infrastructure problems at massive scale. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate networking systems that support large-scale AI training and inference infrastructure Improve performance, reliability, and scalability across host networking, datacenter fabrics, and WAN systems Develop automation for provisioning, configuration management, validation, upgrades, and lifecycle management of networking infrastructure Build tooling and observability systems for network health, performance analysis, debugging, and automated remediation Optimize network performance across technologies such as RDMA, RoCE, InfiniBand, Ethernet, and high-perf

About the Team Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms. The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal and VMs dependable & scalable foundations for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Software Engineer, Host Assurance to build and operate the services, APIs, and host software that establish and maintain trust in our compute infrastructure. You will own production software from design and implementation through testing, rollout, observability, and operation. Your work will support capabilities such as machine identity, certificate issuance and enrollment, secure bootstrap, and host attestation across bare-metal and VM environments. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to reason across software and host-system boundaries and learn unfamiliar parts of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online - securely, responsibly, and at global scale - underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability. You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives—inc

About the Team Compute Foundations builds the software that manages OpenAI’s GPU compute infrastructure across sites, data centers, and infrastructure providers, supporting model training and inference. Our systems turn large, heterogeneous fleets of machines into dependable compute for research and products. We build Kubernetes-based control planes, controllers, services, and APIs that coordinate the lifecycle of machines and clusters. We connect global infrastructure management with the realities of bare-metal systems, giving clients consistent interfaces across differences in hardware, topology, and provider behavior. About the Role You will build distributed systems that provision, configure, and manage compute throughout its lifecycle. Your work will connect global services and Kubernetes controllers with the systems that bring machines online, update them safely, and recover them when something goes wrong. This role combines software architecture with an understanding of how machines and data centers work. You might design a lifecycle API, improve controller performance under high concurrency and provider rate limits, or trace a provisioning failure from an API through reconciliation to network boot or host configuration. You will help these systems remain reliable as the fleet expands across sites and generations of GPU hardware. We value depth in relevant systems and the ability to connect layers. You do not need to arrive as an expert in every component of the stack. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate Kubernetes-based controllers and distributed services that coordinate infrastructure across sites, isolate failures, and scale as GPU capacity grows. Define APIs and resource models that let clients request and track lifecycle operations through consistent interfaces across hardware platforms and providers. Build provisioning and configuration services that coordinate network boot, hardware management interfaces, and the deployment of firmware,

We are hiring a Security Software Engineer to design and implement the hardware-backed security foundations used across OpenAI’s device ecosystem. A central focus of this role is hardening the boundary between our policy systems and the HSMs that protect sensitive cryptographic keys. This boundary determines which operations may be performed, what may be signed, which policies must be satisfied, and how changes to trusted software and policy are authorized. You will develop security-critical software and firmware within, or immediately adjacent to, an HSM trust boundary. Depending on your background, this may include HSM trusted applications, firmware services, cryptographic mechanisms, device drivers, PKCS#11 components, secure-provisioning protocols, or signing-policy enforcement systems. This is a hands-on software-engineering role. You will be expected to design systems, write and review production code, debug across hardware and software boundaries, and carry projects from initial requirements through deployment. It is not an HSM administration, PKI operations, compliance, or architecture-only position. In This Role, You Will Design and implement security-critical software and firmware for HSMs, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and hardware roots of trust. Build and harden the policy-to-HSM boundary responsible for authorizing certificate issuance and cryptographic signing operations. Develop HSM trusted applications, firmware components, host interfaces, device drivers, SDKs, or cryptographic service integrations. Implement or extend cryptographic interfaces such as PKCS#11, OpenSSL providers or engines, platform key-storage APIs, or comparable hardware-security interfaces. Build firmware and software that cryptographically enforces key generation, provisioning, usage, rotation, recovery, and destruction policies. Design and implement HSM-backed certificate authority, code-signing, key-management, and device-identity systems. Develop end-to-end