Hardware Lead Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture. About the Role OpenAI is seeking to build an investigative capability for Secure Manufacturing & Stealth programs. The risk surface for unreleased products, prototypes, confidential hardware, infrastructure, supply chain, manufacturing, and launch-readiness efforts spans employees, vendors, suppliers, logistics partners, physical movement of assets, procurement records, manufacturing workflows, access systems, device telemetry, and adversarial collection. This role is intended to build and run investigations across that specialized environment. In this role, you will: Lead complex SMS investigations to proactively identify and mitigate risks to unreleased products, prototypes, confidential hardware, secure manufacturing programs, and launch-readiness efforts. Investigate unauthorized disclosure, suspected leaks, insider risk, supplier compromise, vendor misconduct, theft, diversion, tampering, counterfeiting, surveillance, adversarial collection, and suspicious activity involving sensitive programs. Connect digital evidence, physical access activity, supply chain records, manufacturing data, vendor behavior, employee activity, collaboration metadata, procurement records, shipping data, and OSINT into clear findings and risk-reduction actions. Conduct proactive threat hunting to surface early indicators of compromise, collection, leakage, or insider activity affecting sensitive programs. Develop investigative playbooks, evidence-handling standards,

About the Team The Finance Platform & Technology team at OpenAI builds and scales the future-proof systems and data architecture that power our core financial operations. We enable business agility, compliance, and operational excellence across quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay, inventory, and asset management for both B2B and B2C. Our focus is on modernizing workflows through strategic integrations, scalable automation, and seamless data flows empowering smarter decisions, reliable reporting, and sustainable growth as OpenAI evolves About the Role We are looking for a Supply Chain Transformation Architect to redesign and modernize our end-to-end supply chain operations supporting robotics, consumer hardware, and data center infrastructure. This role sits at the intersection of process, systems, and data. Your primary focus will be transforming supply chain processes across planning, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and fulfillment—then enabling those processes with the right systems architecture, data foundation, and AI-driven automation. You will help move the organization from manual, reactive operations to intelligent, data-driven supply chain execution. In this role you will: Lead End-to-End Supply Chain Transformation Evaluate and redesign core supply chain processes across demand planning, supply planning, procurement, manufacturing operations, logistics, and fulfillment. Identify operational bottlenecks, fragmented workflows, and manual processes that limit scalability. Build standardized process frameworks and operating models that support rapid scaling of hardware programs. Drive Operational Excellence Implement structured supply chain practices such as: S&OP / Integrated Business Planning Supply risk management Inventory optimization Supplier collaboration frameworks Logistics visibility and execution models Establish operational KPIs and governance to improve predictability, responsiveness, and resilience. Architect the Digital Supply Chain Tra

About the Team Tax and Trade at OpenAI shapes business strategy by embedding critical tax, export control, customs, and cross-border considerations into how the company builds, sources, scales, and operates in support of the mission. We combine deep expertise with practical systems thinking to look around corners, identify emerging risks and opportunities early, and help teams make smarter decisions at the point where strategy becomes execution. Across procurement, hardware operations, manufacturing, logistics, finance, legal, supplier onboarding, and operator workflows, we build robust, scalable support services leveraging cutting-edge technology—including governed AI and automation—to make complex regulated work more durable, more efficient, and easier to scale. About the Role We’re hiring a Senior Manager, Export Controls to lead OpenAI’s export controls strategy and operating model. This is a senior role with broad scope across advanced computing, semiconductors, software, hardware, manufacturing, and high technology partnerships. You will refine how OpenAI classifies controlled technology, software, and hardware, structures access-controlled environments, manages licensing and supplier commitments, and scales export-control operations in a way that supports the company’s pace of innovation. You will also shape how OpenAI applies AI and agentic workflows to policy-heavy operational work, building systems that make complex rules easier to navigate and easier to execute. In this role, you will: Refine the strategy and operating model for OpenAI’s export controls program across advanced computing, semiconductors, software, hardware, manufacturing, and high technology partnerships. Own export classification and licensing strategy for controlled technical data, software, hardware, and research environments. Lead the design and operation of compliant controlled environments and related governance processes. Partner with Research and Infrastructure to support efficient

About Flexport: At Flexport, we believe global trade can move the human race forward. That’s why it’s our mission to make global commerce so easy there will be more of it. We’re shaping the future of a $10T industry with solutions powered by innovative technology and exceptional people. Today, companies of all sizes—from emerging brands to Fortune 500s—use Flexport technology to move more than $19B of merchandise across 112 countries a year. The recent global supply chain crisis has put Flexport center stage as we continue to play a pivotal role in how goods move around the world. We are proud to have the support of the best investors in the game who believe in our mission, solutions and people. Ready to tackle global challenges that impact business, society, and the environment? Come join us. Help Win New Business The Opportunity: We are scaling our dedicated Data Center practice, and we are looking for the person who will lead it. This is a founding commercial role. You will start as a team of one, owning the full sales motion end-to-end, and you will build the team around you as the practice grows. You will define how Flexport goes to market with hyperscalers, hardware OEMs, and the broader ecosystem. You will set the playbook, win the first marquee accounts, and hire the people who scale what you build. Reporting directly to the Regional General Manager, you will operate with a high degree of autonomy and direct access to executive leadership. This role features a 50/50 compensation model (Base + Uncapped bonus, with accelerators), with OTEs of $350k+, designed for strong leaders who take bets on themselves. Why This Role Is Different: The data center logistics market is not a standard freight problem. A single AI compute rack can cost more than $1 million and weigh up to 4,000 pounds. Racks contain Class 9 dangerous goods (lithium-ion batteries) and liquid cooling systems requiring specialized handling. Construction sequencing failures delayed 57% o

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. In this role you will: As a Hardware Test Engineer, you will work on Machine Learning/AI hardware system projects to craft the solutions for current and future data center deployments. You will bring a strong understanding of hardware system testing, excellent project management skills, and the ability to collaborate across multiple teams to ensure efficient lab operations. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and executing comprehensive test plans that ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our supercomputing hardware systems. You will develop detailed test plans and methodologies tailored to hardware components, including processors, memory modules, custom accelerators and interconnects. You will collaborate with hardware design, manufacturing, firmware teams and vendors to identify, analyze, and resolve issues affecting hardware, power, thermal and high-speed interconnects. You will perform in-depth debugging on the hardware system Excellent analytical skills to diagnose hardware issues, troubleshoot problems, and propose solutions. Ability to interpret complex test data, identify trends, and draw meaningful conclusions. High-speed links, with a focus on SerDes (Serializer/Deserializer) technology to assess signal integrity, error rates, and overall link performance. You will collaborate with the lab manager to maintain the equipment and hardware systems, including oscilloscopes, thermal test chambers, liquid cooling systems, and other mea

About the Team OpenAI’s acquisition of io marks our entry into consumer hardware and our ambition to define the next human–computer interface. Success in hardware requires strong financial stewardship across the full product cost stack—from early design and sourcing decisions through manufacturing, logistics, inventory, returns, and warranty. Hardware Finance works across Product, Supply Chain, Operations, Accounting, Systems/Data, and Finance to connect business decisions to product cost, inventory, cash, COGS, and margin. About the Role We are seeking a Hardware Finance Manager to own an assigned area of hardware COGS and inventory end to end. The initial assignment will depend on business priorities and the successful candidate’s expertise. It may include BOM and product cost, manufacturing variance analysis, inventory planning, logistics, returns and warranty, customer support, or another connected set of hardware-finance responsibilities. This is an individual-contributor role with broad scope. Prior hardware experience and deep, hands-on expertise in at least two relevant domains are required. The person will be expected to operate independently, build reusable processes and analytical workflows, and remain accountable for the analysis, judgment, and recommendations. In this role, you will: Own an assigned area of hardware COGS and inventory end to end. Own forecasting, close, and business variance analysis for the assigned scope. Provide hardware leadership with clear variance explanations, trend analysis, and forward-looking signals that connect business and supplier decisions to inventory, cash, COGS, and margin. Partner with business teams and Finance Platforms to establish the financial data, systems, and dashboards needed to support analysis. Ensure data integrity and governance through clear definitions, ownership, validation checks, controls, and review processes. Improve forecasting, reporting, systems, and finance processes so they remain reliable an

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 You will develop and evolve the tooling ecosystem that hardware engineers rely on every day — from hardware compilers and IR transformations to simulation, debugging, and automation infrastructure. The work spans software engineering, compiler concepts, and practical hardware workflows, with direct impact on how quickly and effectively we design next-generation AI systems. You’ll collaborate closely with architects, RTL designers, and verification engineers to translate real engineering friction into durable, scalable tooling solutions. In this role you will: Build and improve the software tooling that makes hardware teams faster: compilation, IR transforms, RTL generation, simulation, debug, and automation. Extend and integrate hardware compiler stacks (frontends, IR passes, lowering, scheduling, codegen to Verilog/SystemVerilog) and connect them to real design workflows. Improve developer experience and reliability: reproducible builds, better error messages, faster iteration loops, and dependable CI and regression infrastructure. Work closely with designers and verification engineers to turn real pain points into durable tools. Dive into RTL when needed: read and reason about Verilog/SystemVerilog to debug issues, validate tool output, and improve debuggability. Be willing to go all the way down the stack when necessary, including gate-level views, synthesis results, and implementation artifacts. Help enable PPA optimization loops by building analysis and au

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI. About the Role As an Engineer on our hardware optimization and co-design team, you will co-design future hardware from different vendors for programmability and performance. You will work with our kernel, compiler and machine learning engineers to understand their unique needs related to ML techniques, algorithms, numerical approximations, programming expressivity, and compiler optimizations. You will evangelize these constraints with various vendors to develop and influence future hardware architectures towards efficient training and inference on our models. If you are excited about efficiently distributing a large language model across devices, dealing with and optimizing system-wide/rack-wide networking bottlenecks and eventually tailoring the compute pipe and memory hierarchy of the hardware platform, simulating workloads at different abstractions and working closely with our partners, this is the perfect opportunity! This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Key Responsibilities Co-design future hardware for programmability and performance with our hardware vendors Assist hardware vendors in developing optimal kernels and add support for it in our compiler Develop performance estimates for critical kernels for different hardware configurations and drive decisions on compute core and memory h

About the Team The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support the organization's long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest impact outcomes. About the Role We are hiring a Hardware Finance Manager, Consolidations & Systems to own the consolidated financial reporting, forecasting cadence, and financial systems across our hardware organizations (Io and Robotics). This role sits at the intersection of Hardware Finance, central FP&A, Accounting, and Finance Systems, and is responsible for ensuring leadership has a single, accurate, and timely financial view of the hardware business. This role will serve as the embedded owner of the hardware financial backbone, with end-to-end responsibility for consolidated P&L reporting, forecasting and variance analysis, and the systems and processes that enable scalable, decision-ready insights. You will help ensure hardware financials are consistent, auditable, and fit for executive and board-level decision-making as the organization scales in size, complexity, and capital intensity. We have a strong preference for candidates who can be based in our San Francisco HQ. 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 oversee multiple areas of responsibility: Own end-to-end consolidated financial reporting for all hardware organizations (Io and Robotics), delivering a single, integrated P&L view across R&D, Product, Revenue, COGS, and OpEx. Establish and run the hardware financial operating cadence, including monthly close, forecasting, reforecasting, and variance analysis, ensuring consistency and accountability across teams. Serve as a key finance partner to Hardware Finance leads, central FP&A, and Accounting, aligning bottoms-up plans with accounting actuals and enterprise reporting requirements. Build and maintain consoli

About the Team The Hardware Health and Observability team owns the end-to-end health lifecycle of OpenAI’s global compute fleet. Our mission is to maximize healthy, usable compute across accelerator vendors, generations, cloud providers, and regions through reliable health signals, automated remediation, and scalable operational tooling. We build the systems that observe, detect, remediate, and verify hardware issues across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure, enabling frontier model training and inference workloads to run reliably at hyperscale. We are the last line of defense for the success of OAI’s production and research workloads. About the Role On the Hardware Health and Observability team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps OpenAI’s largest compute clusters healthy and operational at scale. Even small numbers of unhealthy systems can impact large-scale training and inference workloads. This team focuses on minimizing downtime, improving fleet efficiency, and ensuring compute resources remain continuously available to researchers and product teams. Engineers on this team own problems end-to-end, from defining health signals and debugging failures to building automated remediation systems that operate across millions of GPUs globally. In this role, you will: Define and maintain health signals across GPUs, CPUs, networking, and platform infrastructure. Build and evolve health checks that detect, remediate, and verify failures at scale. Ensure critical health checks execute with minimal latency to maximize workload uptime. Investigate hardware failures and system-level issues across large-scale compute environments. Own node lifecycle workflows including drain, quarantine, repair, RMA, and return-to-service processes. Build automation and tooling that enables global cluster management with minimal manual intervention. Partner with workload, reliability, and provider teams to integrate health signals into training and inference system

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 Security Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end security foundation for OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems, working across hardware security, embedded security, system security, and practical deployment at data center scale. You will partner with silicon, hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and security teams to define and deliver system-level device trust. This includes boot integrity, device identity, provisioning, attestation, management-plane security, storage encryption, debug controls, firmware update and recovery, RMA, and decommissioning. You will be accountable for turning threat models into requirements, requirements into implementation, and implementation into validation evidence that can support launch decisions. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from early design through production deployment. Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across heterogeneous devices. Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up. Harden management

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 As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads. Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware. Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments. Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales. Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime b

About the Team OpenAI is building Procurement of the future: one that uses AI-enabled systems, clean data, and scalable processes to help the business absorb increasing complexity, speed, volume, and throughput — while enabling teams across OpenAI to operate more strategically and at greater scale. The Hardware Procurement Operations team supports the operational flow of goods and hardware purchasing across OpenAI's hardware business units. We help teams turn business needs into controlled, accurate, and executable procurement activity, from request intake through purchase orders, supplier coordination, change management, receiving readiness, and downstream invoice support. As OpenAI scales, we are building procurement operations that can support changing hardware needs, new business unit priorities, and increasing operational complexity. That means creating practical standards where they help, preserving flexibility where the business requires it, and continuously improving how requests, suppliers, POs, data, and controls move through our systems. About the Role As a Senior Manager of Procurement Operations focused on Hardware, you will own procurement operations for one or more assigned hardware business units. You will be the day-to-day DRI for hardware and goods procurement activity, leading work from intake through purchase requests, POs, supplier needs, changes, receiving readiness, and operational escalations. This is a hands-on operator-builder role for someone who understands the practical complexity of hardware and goods procurement and can both run the work and redesign how the work gets done. You will keep work moving while improving the operating model through better systems, workflows, automation, AI-enabled processes, controls, metrics, and operating leverage. You will evaluate how people, process, policy, systems, data, fiscal controls, and accounting practices come together, and you will work closely with other Central Procurement and BU Procurement

About the team The Fleet team at OpenAI supports the computing environment that powers our cutting-edge research and product development. We oversee large-scale systems that span data centers, GPUs, networking, and more, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency. Our work enables OpenAI’s models to operate seamlessly at scale, supporting both internal research and external products like ChatGPT. We prioritize safety, reliability, and responsible AI deployment over unchecked growth. About the role As a software engineer on the Fleet Hardware team, you will be responsible for the reliability and uptime of all of OpenAI’s compute fleet. Minimizing hardware failure is key to research training progress and stable services, as even a single hardware hiccup can cause significant disruptions. With increasingly large supercomputers, the stakes continue to rise. Being at the forefront of technology means that we are often the pioneers in troubleshooting these state-of-the-art systems at scale. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and devise innovative solutions to maintain the health and efficiency of our supercomputing infrastructure. Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale. In this role, you will: Build and maintain automation systems for provisioning and managing server fleets. Develop tools to monitor server health, performance, and lifecycle events. Collaborate with clusters, networking, and infrastructure teams. Partner with external operators to ensure a high level of quality. Identify and fix performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Continuously improve automation to reduce manual work

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 Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will design, build, integrate, and validate the software used to manufacture, qualify, and deliver our hardware from the factory. You will work across the stack to create the infrastructure that runs internally and externally to coordinate all aspects of the production process. You will create the critical tools and procedures to execute, capture, process, and present the data resulting from the end to end assembly and validation of our hardware across multiple vendors and sites. This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will work closely across teams both internal and external to define the standards that will be used across our products to ensure the velocity and quality of our 1P hardware. You will own the implementation, deployment, and output of these systems as well their continued maintenance and SLAs. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite). Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Design, develop, and maintain the software infrastructure for manufacturing process execution and data export. Own integration across internal customers and vendor systems and processes. Build and maintain the CI, release, and delivery pipeline of tooling to external partners. Build and maintain internal systems to ingest, process, deliver, and visualize critical data for internal teams and systems. Build system health monitoring, telemetry, remote d