Jobs in United States

Early Career Mechanical Design Engineer in United States

466 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current early career mechanical design engineer jobs across United States. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. About the Role This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. In this role, you will: Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL trai

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Infrastructure Engineering function sits within IT and is responsible for reliably building, deploying, and operating critical on prem and hybrid environments that power internal services and critical R&D environments. This is an early, high-leverage technical role focused on applying strong Site Reliability Engineering discipline to environments where uptime, safety, recoverability, and security are non-negotiable. This person helps replace bespoke, one-off infrastructure with standardized infrastructure-as-code building blocks that compound reliability and operational leverage as OpenAI scales. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Site Reliability Engineer working on security infrastructure to design, build, and operate reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure that underpins identity, access, endpoint, and shared platform services across the company. In this role, you will be a senior technical owner for infrastructure and identity systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through policy enforcement, upgrades, recovery, and day-two operations. You will build durable, production-grade platforms that remove operational friction, enforce security by default, and enable teams to move faster with confidence. This role is well suited for a hands-on senior engineer who thrives in ambiguity, enjoys owning complex systems end to end, and raises the reliability and security bar by replacing fragile implementations with standardized, repeatable infrastructure. This role is based in our San Francisco HQ and requires in-office presence. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate reliable infrastructure across on-prem, hybrid, shared, and product adjacent environments. Establish standardized infrastructure patterns that replace bespoke implementations with repeatable, auditable, secure-by-default systems. Own the lifecycle of critical infrastructure platforms, including provisioning, deployment, upgrades, patching,

AWSAzureRestAgile
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We are looking for a hands-on lead to build and run OpenAI's Incidents & Escalations function within User Operations. This is a player-coach role with a meaningful hands-on operating component. You will set the operating model and also step into active incidents and urgent escalations when needed, coordinating with on-call teams, driving clear ownership, supporting communications, and ensuring issues move through resolution and post-incident closure. During active incidents, you will coordinate with the relevant on-call teams and cross-functional responders across Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, and Go-To-Market. You will help keep teams aligned, maintain timelines, clarify ownership, escalate when needed, and ensure internal, executive, customer-facing, and external communications are accurate and timely, including status page updates when required. For escalations, you will build and run the processes for tracking, triaging, mitigating, and resolving critical customer and user issues. After incidents and escalations, you will own the follow-through: retrospectives, root cause identification, action item tracking, trend analysis, and process improvements that reduce repeat issues over time. You will also help define the long-term operating model for incidents and escalations across Support D

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

The ChatGPT Finances team builds experiences that help people connect their financial accounts, understand their financial picture, and ask useful questions about their finances through ChatGPT. Our work spans account connectivity, data ingestion, dashboards, personalized insights, and conversational experiences. We collaborate across product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and data integrations to make complex financial information understandable and actionable. This is an early and ambitious product area with a substantial roadmap. We are looking for engineers who want to shape both the first user experiences and the durable systems required to earn and keep users’ trust. About the role We’re looking for full-stack product engineers to build and scale ChatGPT Finances. You will own features across the stack—from polished frontend experiences to the APIs, services, and data models that power them. This role is well suited to engineers who combine strong product judgment with broad technical depth. You should care about how quickly users can understand their financial lives, how reliably data moves through the system, and how AI can answer financial questions in a grounded, transparent, and useful way. You will work closely with product, design, research, infrastructure, security, and data integration teams to take ideas from early prototypes to reliable production experiences. In this role, you will Own full-stack product features from user experience and frontend implementation through backend services, data models, deployment, and observability. Build polished, accessible, and performant interfaces for account connection, dashboards, insights, and conversational workflows. Design APIs and backend systems that safely ingest, normalize, and serve financial data. Build resilient integrations that handle synchronization, data freshness, partial failures, permissions, and user consent. Bring new AI capabilities into production while prioritizing grounding

TypeScriptPythonReactNode.js
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Consumer Devices team is building a new generation of AI-powered products that seamlessly integrate hardware and software to create intuitive, transformative experiences. We bring together experts across embedded systems, machine learning, hardware, design, and product engineering to develop products at the intersection of AI and consumer technology. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a System Performance Engineer to profile, benchmark, and optimize performance across our embedded hardware products. In this role, you will work across operating systems, applications, camera and vision, graphics, and platform teams to define product KPIs, build performance tooling, and drive optimizations from early lab characterization through product launch and real-world usage. You will help establish the performance standards that shape the user experience of our products, ensuring they remain responsive, efficient, and reliable throughout their lifecycle. This role requires deep expertise in embedded or high-performance systems, strong operating systems fundamentals, and hands-on experience debugging under tight latency, power, and memory constraints. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days per week in the office and one day working remotely. Relocation assistance is available for new hires. In this role, you will: Develop system performance benchmarks, methodologies, and policies to evaluate end-to-end product behavior. Profile and analyze performance across key product use cases and workloads using custom and industry-standard profiling tools. Partner closely with engineering teams to identify bottlenecks and drive performance optimizations across the software stack. Define high-level product KPIs and establish measurement frameworks to measure launch readiness and monitor performance throughout the product lifecycle. Measure, re

PythonAWSLinuxRest
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customer’s adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We are looking for a Technical Program Manager to join our Senior Support Engineering team. This role is an exciting opportunity to help define and implement foundational support practices that will scale with OpenAI’s growth. You will lead efforts to establish new operational frameworks, driving process alignment with various internal teams, and leading tooling and automation projects. This position offers the chance to make a significant impact in shaping customer experience while collaborating across multiple teams. We’re looking for people who thrive at the intersection of project management, systems building, data science/data engineering/software engineering, team enablement, and customer advocacy – and enjoy working cross-functionally in a fast-paced, evolving environment. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and follows a hybrid work model of 3 days in-office per week. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Lead support delivery programs for Tier 3 frontline delivery for our most strategic customers, including productivity and workflow improvements, team operations, and knowledge management for the Support Delivery team Partner with Support Delivery and cross-functional leadership to define the experience, stand up the program, manage pilots and rollout, and ensure premium operations and

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking a Senior Actuator Design and Integration Engineer to lead the development of custom electromechanical actuators for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, reliability, and manufacturing teams. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision electromechanical systems, including motors, transmissions, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuators, including motors, transmissions, sensing, thermal systems, structural components, and packaging. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, backdrivability, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-loop pe

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with customers across industries and digital-native businesses to identify where AI can create value, design secure and scalable solutions, and help those solutions move from early exploration into sustained production adoption. The team brings together technical strategy, customer partnership, and practical deployment expertise, working closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and specialist delivery teams. About the Role As an AI Architect, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of customers and the primary technical counterpart to their leadership teams. You will act as the “CTO of your book of business”, shaping each customer's AI strategy and guiding their journey from pre-sales discovery and solution evaluation through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact. You will own the technical account plan across ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In partnership with the Account Director, you will translate business priorities into a focused use-case portfolio, an actionable adoption roadmap, and a clear path to durable customer value and growth. The Account Director owns commercial strategy; you own the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value. You will remain accountable for the technical outcome while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, and partners to provide deeper expertise and execute work where needed. This role calls for strong industry fluency, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to move confidently between executive strategy and hands-on technical conversations. In this role, you will: Serve as the primary technical advisor and long-term technical relationship owner for a named portfolio of existing customers and pre-sales prospect

JavaScriptPythonJavaAWS
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking a Senior Mechanical Engineer to lead the design, integration, and sustaining engineering of mechanical subsystems in robotic platforms. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design — including tolerance, alignment, load paths, wear, and failure modes — and robotics. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including structures, mechanisms, and actuators. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufacturing partners

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We’re looking for dedicated, experienced, and deeply curious individuals to help solve some of the most complex challenges faced by our customers while building the future of post-AGI support alongside us. In this role, you’ll work directly with customers through support tickets and live calls, troubleshooting high-impact issues and resolving novel, often ambiguous technical problems in one of the fastest-moving environments in technology. As AI adoption rapidly accelerates, the work you do will directly support mission-critical systems being built on OpenAI’s platform, serving as a critical line of defense for customers operating at massive scale. Beyond resolving technical issues, you’ll help define what world-class support looks like in an AGI-driven future. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Operations to improve systems, reduce bugs, and elevate the customer experience, while leveraging automation, agents, and our own AI technology to transform how support operates at scale. You’ll be responsible for: Working directly with customers to troubleshoot and resolve their most complex technical issues, including API failures, integration challenges, authentication errors, and production incidents. Providing end-to-end ownership through debugging logs, analyzing system behavior, reproducing issues, and

PythonAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking a Mechanical Engineer to design and prototype novel tactile, proprioceptive and force sensor solutions. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design and robotic sensing including tactile sensors, force sensing and position sensing. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new sensor subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including tactile sensors, load cells, force torque sensors and joint encoders. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, calibration and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufact

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the team The Applied AI Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications for developers and startups. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to late-stage startups. About the Role We are seeking a technically proficient, business-minded Applied AI Engineer to help push the frontier of advanced AI with our strategic startup customers. You'll work with some of the most exciting AI startups in the world, guiding them through ideation, development, delivery, and scaling to accelerate and maximize the value of what they build on our platform. You will have the opportunity to work on the most novel and creative use cases being built on our API, serving as a critical partner in collecting and delivering high-fidelity product and model feedback internally. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Applied Research, and Product teams, and you will report to the Startups Applied AI Lead. This role is based in our San Francisco or New York offices. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Partner closely with strategic startup customers as their technical thought partner to build novel applications on our API, helping them rapidly move from ideation to scale. Provide proactive guidance to maximize business impact and accelerate application development. Experiment and prototype alongside customers, demonstrating practical use cases. Contribute to open-source resources and scale the function by sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing useful resources. Synthesize and deliver valuable feedback to the Product and Research

JavaScriptPythonJavaAWS
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The User Operations team (Support) is central to ensuring that our customers' experience with our products is nothing short of exceptional. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We are seeking a dynamic support strategy operator to drive strategic and operational initiatives across OpenAI’s customer support/user operations landscape. In this role, you will work closely with leaders in User Operations and across the company to help scale, mature, and optimize our support operations. Your work will span a range of strategic initiatives aimed at enhancing the customer experience and driving operational excellence, ensuring that our support organization can sustainably scale with the business's growth. You’ll be responsible for deeply understanding our organization and priorities – where we’re at, where we’re going – and will work relentlessly towards planning and executing on our vision to provide best-in-class support. This role is not “creating and executing playbooks”. AI has and will continue to fundamentally change the customer experience and the way we build tools and organizations; this role requires a proactive, strategic planner and executor that can think ten steps ahead, defining the future of customer support at OpenAI and in the world. In this role, you will: Drive the ideation and operationalization of new support systems, processes, and programs. Collaborate with leaders to identify, evaluate, and prioritize new strategic and operational initiatives, ensuring alignment with company goals and unique organizational objectives Work with product, enginee

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is

PythonAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI’s User Operations team shepherds our customers’ adoption of AI and ensures that our customers' product experience is nothing short of exceptional. We are building the very first post-AGI support team. We resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, and support customers in maximizing value and adoption from deploying our products. We work closely with Sales, Technical Success, Product, Engineering and others, to deliver the best possible experience to our customers at scale. OpenAI's customers represent a range of diverse backgrounds and maturity, from early-stage startups to established global enterprises. About the Role We’re looking for dedicated, experienced, and deeply curious individuals to help solve some of the most complex challenges faced by our customers while building the future of post-AGI support alongside us. In this role, you’ll work directly with customers through support tickets and live calls, troubleshooting high-impact issues and resolving novel, often ambiguous technical problems in one of the fastest-moving environments in technology. As AI adoption rapidly accelerates, the work you do will directly support mission-critical systems being built on OpenAI’s platform, serving as a critical line of defense for customers operating at massive scale. Beyond resolving technical issues, you’ll help define what world-class support looks like in an AGI-driven future. You’ll partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Operations to improve systems, reduce bugs, and elevate the customer experience, while leveraging automation, agents, and our own AI technology to transform how support operates at scale. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. As employees in this role with work with many customers based on the East Coast, regularly weekday hours will commence at 6am Pacific. To comply with a U.S. government contract, applicants for this position must be U.

PythonAWSRestAI
🔔

Get new early career mechanical design engineer jobs in United States by email

Daily job updates · Unsubscribe anytime