Hardware Operations Engineer in San Francisco

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 Lead Robotics Safety Engineer to define and lead the product safety strategy for our robotics program. You will work closely with leadership, engineering, research, legal, and policy teams to ensure safety is integrated into our products from the earliest stages of development through deployment. This role combines product safety, regulatory strategy, systems engineering, and risk management. You will help shape how we think about safety across robotic platforms, influence product architecture and development decisions, and ensure our systems are designed to meet both current and emerging regulatory expectations. You will serve as a subject matter expert on robotics safety standards, regulatory frameworks, and safety engineering practices while helping establish the long-term safety strategy for our products and organization. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will Define and lead the product safety strategy for robotic systems across the development lifecycle. Monitor and influence emerging regulatory frameworks, industry standards, and policy developments relevant to robotics and autonomous systems. Partner with engineering teams to translate safety requirements into product architecture, design decisions, and engineering requirements. Develop and maintain system-level hazard analyses, risk assessments, and safety cases for robotic products. Establish safety requirements, verification strat

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

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

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

About the Team The OpenAI 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 As a Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design, build, and operate some of the largest distributed data systems in the world. You will be responsible for the end-to-end stack to deliver and consume top-quality data for robotics training at exabyte-scale. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI’s rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable, large-scale systems in high-stakes environments. 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. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure such as exabyte-scale distributed data processing, data selection, automated labeling, and training data loaders. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. Deliver the best possible data for training robotics models. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented a

About 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 Role We're a growing hardware company. As we scale, we also need a supply chain that evolves and stays nimble to the changing shape and direction our engineers designs. Today we need someone who understands the iterative process of R&D but is also ready to expand into new product introduction (NPI), and after that, high-volume manufacturing. We're hiring for where we're headed, not just where we are today. This role prioritizes judgment, adaptability, and analytical ability over years of experience alone. A strong candidate will be able to reason from first principles, quickly develop expertise in new commodities, and identify potential commercial or technical issues before they affect the program. While extensive tenure is not required, this is not an entry-level position; candidates should have a solid foundation in strategic sourcing, supplier management, and hardware manufacturing. Over time, you'll help us build out a full supply chain organization: buyers, global supply managers (GSMs), contract manufacturing leads, and specialists across categories like precision machining, gears and mechanical components, EMS/PCBA, electrical components, and contract/JDM manufacturing. Where this role goes - into a specific commodity, into people management, into ops - will depend on where you're strongest and where the business needs you most. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 4 days a week and up to 30% travel to vendor sites. In this role you will: Partner directly with engineering during R&

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 hiring a Sim Infrastructure Engineer to turn simulation systems into reliable, automated, production-quality pipelines that power model training, evaluation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. This role owns the automation, orchestration, and tool integration that apply simulation to concrete robotics tasks: building CI/CD for SIL/HIL, presubmit checks, automatic model evaluation, metric computation and reporting, and the runtime infrastructure to run simulations at scale. You will collaborate closely with Sim Realism, Sim Environments, Research, and Ops to make simulation an integrated, reproducible, and measurable part of our ML and robotics workflows. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Build and maintain presubmit checks, continuous integration and deployment pipelines for simulation code, environments, and tasks so simulation artifacts are testable, versioned, and reproducible. Implement end-to-end automation to run model evaluation in sim (SIL) and orchestrate HIL runs; compute realism and task metrics, generate dashboards and alerts, and ensure evaluation is repeatable and auditable. Create robust APIs and connectors so research, training, and data-collection systems can schedule, seed, and evaluate batches of simulations; support RL rollouts, imitation-data collection, and presubmit model checks. Build scheduling, batching and orchestration for running very large numbers of concurrent rollouts (target tens of thousands of rollouts / large RL workloads), sol

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’re looking for a GPU Inference Engineer to contribute to improvements in model serving efficiency for our Robotics research. This is a high-impact role where you’ll drive initiatives to optimize inference performance and scalability. You’ll also be engaged in model design, to help assist our researchers in developing inference-friendly models. This role is critical to scaling the team’s broader goals - it will directly enable leadership to focus on higher-leverage initiatives by building a stronger technical foundation. In this role you will: Perform engineering efforts focused on improving model serving, inference performance, and system efficiency Drive optimizations from a kernel and data movement perspective to improve system throughput and reliability Partner closely with research and product teams to ensure our models perform effectively at scale Design, build, and improve critical serving infrastructure to support Robotics growth and reliability needs You might thrive in this role if you: Have deep expertise in model performance optimization, particularly at the inference layer Have a strong background in kernel-level systems, data movement, and low-level performance tuning Are excited about scaling high-performing AI systems that serve real-world, multimodal workloads Can navigate ambiguity, set technical direction, and drive complex initiatives to completion 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. About OpenAI OpenAI i

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 You will work at the cutting edge of OpenAI's robotics hardware, partnering with hardware and software teams to develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems. Working closely with engineers, you will build prototypes, execute experiments, fabricate fixtures, troubleshoot hardware, and help drive rapid iteration on new robotic technologies. Your practical problem-solving and technical judgment will help move projects from concept to reality. We are looking for versatile, hands-on generalists who enjoy solving problems across mechanical, electrical, fabrication, and experimental domains. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in high-velocity and early-stage hardware development environments, provide thoughtful feedback to engineering teams, and help improve both hardware and development processes. This role will help accelerate robotics development by enabling fast, high-quality iteration on new hardware concepts and systems. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and is in-person 5 days a week. In this role, you will: Partner closely with engineers, researchers, and other members of the robotics team to support prototype development, experimentation, and hardware iteration. Build, modify, troubleshoot, and repair robotic systems and electromechanical assemblies spanning structural, electrical, sensing, and actuation subsystems. Design and fabricate fixtures, adapters, test equipment, and other prototype hardware that accelerate development efforts. Execute low-volume builds, engineering changes, and rework activities acro

About the Team The Software Engineering team is responsible for designing and building the scalable, performant, and secure backend systems that power our products—from early prototypes to large-scale deployments. We collaborate closely with product, hardware, and full-stack teams to ensure our infrastructure enables fast iteration while setting a strong foundation for long-term growth. About the Role As a Backend Engineer , you will design and build services, APIs, and infrastructure that support evolving product needs. You’ll apply a deep understanding of backend systems and maintain enough end-to-end context—from hardware to cloud—to guide technical decisions that best serve the product and team. We’re looking for engineers who thrive in fast-paced, collaborative environments and care deeply about building robust systems that scale. This role is based in San Francisco, CA . We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Architect, build, and maintain high-performance, secure backend systems. Design APIs, data models, and infrastructure to support evolving product needs. Balance near-term development velocity with long-term maintainability and scalability. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive, end-to-end solutions. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a focus on backend systems. Have a proven track record of building and scaling systems from early stage to large scale. Are proficient with Python and Go, and familiar with a range of server-side technologies. Have a strong grasp of system design, performance optimization, and security best practices. Can reason about full-stack tradeoffs from hardware through cloud infrastructure. (Nice to have) Have experience with distributed systems and cloud architectures. (Nice to have) Bring a background in instrumentation, analytics, and performanc

About the Team The OpenAI 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 As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI's rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable infrastructure in high-stakes environments. 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. In this role, you will: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems. Demonstrate excellent software enginee

About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds systems that turn advances in model inference and optimization into reliable production capabilities. We enable OpenAI workloads to be qualified and optimized across new accelerator platforms without requiring a one-off port and tuning effort for every hardware target. Our work spans distributed systems, model execution, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, secure partner integrations, evaluation systems, and developer tooling. We build the infrastructure that makes optimization workflows automated, reproducible, and trustworthy. About the Role We are seeking a software engineer to help build the platform that qualifies and optimizes inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments. You will develop both OpenAI-hosted services and secure partner-side software for running long-lived optimization workflows. These workflows generate candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes; compile and execute them on target hardware; verify their correctness; measure their performance; and use the results to guide further optimization. You will work across model architecture, distributed execution, compilers, runtimes, networking, and accelerator systems. A central part of the role is turning research prototypes and one-off hardware bring-up efforts into reliable, reusable infrastructure with clear contracts, reproducible results, strong observability, and well-defined security boundaries. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate APIs and control-plane services for long-running workload qualification and optimization campaigns, including scheduling, retries, checkpointing, resource budgets, and observability. Build secure partner-side execution and evaluation software that can compile, run, verify, profile, and benchmark candidate artifacts on accelerator hardware. Integrate model workloads, hardware profiles, compiler toolchains, runtimes, serving engines, and distributed-exe

About the Team OpenAI’s Infrastructure organization builds and evaluates the systems that power advanced AI workloads. We work closely with hardware, modeling, and architecture teams to ensure that new platforms deliver real-world performance aligned with workload needs. Our team focuses on understanding workload behavior across evolving hardware platforms—bridging the gap between theoretical capability and observed system performance. About the Role We are seeking a Workload Porting & Performance Engineer to evaluate new hardware platforms by porting benchmarks and real-world workloads, analyzing performance, and identifying system bottlenecks. In this role, you will bring up workloads on new systems, characterize performance behavior, and adapt workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. You will play a critical role in validating new platforms and ensuring that performance aligns with expectations across compute, memory, and networking subsystems. This role requires strong hands-on experience with performance analysis, workload optimization, and system-level debugging across hardware and software boundaries. 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. Key Responsibilities Port and enable benchmarks and real-world workloads on new hardware platforms. Evaluate system performance across compute, memory, storage, and networking subsystems. Identify and analyze performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Adapt and optimize workloads to better utilize hardware capabilities. Develop and run performance experiments and profiling workflows. Compare expected vs. observed performance and provide feedback to: hardware architecture teams performance modeling teams system and software engineers. Debug issues across the stack, including software, runtime, and hardware interactions. Provide actionable insights to guide platform readiness and deployment decisions. Qualifications E

About the Team The Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain build systems, CI pipelines, automated test frameworks, and hardware-in-the-loop labs to enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans build systems, developer tools, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure developers can build reliably and ship with confidence. About the Role We are looking for an engineer to help evolve OpenAI’s Consumer Products build and continuous integration systems for a fast-growing engineering organization. This role sits at the intersection of developer productivity, build systems, distributed infrastructure, software quality, and on-device software. You will work on the systems that determine how quickly and confident engineers can move: Bazel-bazed builds, Buildkite pipelines, test coverage, remote caching and execution, CI observability, and tooling that helps engineers understand and fix failures quickly. Our mission is to enable OpenAI to ship software running on consumer devices rapidly with a high bar for correctness, reliability, and safety. The best version of this work is invisible when it succeeds: builds are fast, tests are trusted, CI failures are understandable, and engineers can focus on shipping products instead of fighting infrastructure. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In This Role, You Will Own and evolve Bazel and yocto-based build and test workflows in a polyrepo environment Design and maintain Starlark rules, macros, toolchains, and integrations that make builds hermetic, reproducible, and easy for teams to adopt Improve CI performance and reliability across Buildkite pipelines, including queue time, build time, cache hit rates, retry b

About the Team Like every team at OpenAI, the Marketing team contributes to our broader mission of ensuring responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence With that aim in mind, we are responsible for developing and executing strategies that drive awareness, engagement, and usage for OpenAI’s products and platform amongst our core audiences. We take a data-driven approach to understand our customers' needs and challenges, ensuring that their voices are reflected in product development and messaging. We then partner closely with Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design teams to create a cohesive customer experience across all our channels. Our focus extends beyond just promoting product features; we aim to provide valuable insights and resources that help our users make the most out of AI technologies. About the Role As a Product Marketing Manager for Partner Marketing on the Hardware team, you will help shape the partnership strategy for a new product ecosystem and bring that ecosystem to market with the right partners, programs, and commercial motions. This role calls for a strategic, relationship-oriented marketer who can identify high-potential partners, understand their priorities, and turn shared opportunities into durable, high-impact go-to-market plans. You will work closely with Product, Design, Engineering, Integrated Marketing, Sales, Comms, Finance, Legal, and partner-facing teams to define how first-, second-, and third-party partners participate in our hardware ecosystem. You will lead the marketing and commercial aspects of partnerships, support joint launches, and ensure partner needs are understood internally while OpenAI’s product, brand, and customer experience standards are represented externally. This role reports into the VP of Product Marketing, Hardware, and offers a unique opportunity to build the partner marketing foundation for a new category of AI-powered devices. In this role, you will: Help craft and implement th