Hardware Operations Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms. The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal a dependable, scalable foundation for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between physical hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer, Host Assurance to help build the trust foundations for bare-metal platforms across OpenAI’s global infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on engineering role for a builder who can design, implement, and operate the core security infrastructure that establishes trust in hardware platforms before they are eligible to run workloads. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to work comfortably at low levels of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online - securely, responsibly, and at global scale - underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability. You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives—including novel hardware platforms and emerging deployment models– to make the secure path the easiest path. This role is well suited for engineers who enjo

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 Manufacturing Engineers to lead the development of processes, tooling, and prototype builds for custom motors and actuators. You will own a primary area as a Stator Process / Manufacturing Engineer, Tooling / Fixture Engineer, or Prototype Manufacturing Engineer, taking that work from early development through validation and repeatable execution in close partnership with mechanical, electromagnetic, electrical, test, quality, and supplier teams. These roles focus on the development, integration, and validation of electromechanical manufacturing capabilities, including stator winding processes, assembly and inspection tooling, and actuator prototype builds. You will help translate engineering designs into reliable hardware while establishing scalable processes, equipment, and build practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 5 days a week. In this role, you will Each opening focuses on one of the three specialties below, with shared responsibility for reliable processes and hardware. Stator Process / Manufacturing: develop and validate stacking, winding, termination, and potting processes. Establish process parameters, work instructions, and defect controls that produce consistent results across trained operators. Tooling / Fixture: design and deliver winding tools, assembly fixtures, inspection gauges, and bench equipment, from CAD and drawings through fabrication, commissioning, and troubleshooting. Improve setup time, labor, and repeatability. Prototype M

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. The Operating Systems team is critical in this mission, turning sophisticated hardware and AI capabilities into a reliable, trusted platform. Security is central to that work: we define trust boundaries, integrate hardware-backed protections, isolate sensitive context, and establish the guardrails that let AI applications and agents act safely, privately, and under user control. About the Role We’re looking for a Software Security Architect to define the security architecture for OpenAI’s next-generation operating system. You’ll work alongside hardware security architects and partner with operating system, silicon, firmware, privacy, and product teams to protect users, their devices, and their data. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who can connect operating system internals, hardware-backed security, and real-world product constraints. Your work will shape the platform’s trust model, protect sensitive information, and set the technical foundations for AI that is safe, private, and under user control. In this role, you will: Define the operating system’s security architecture, trust boundaries, privilege model, and protections for sensitive user data. Partner with hardware security architects to integrate roots of trust, secure elements, trusted execution environments, and processor security capabilities into the operating system. Desig

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As an OS / K8s Systems Engineer at Baseten, you’ll build the automation and systems that turn raw GPU hardware into production-ready compute. From provisioning to orchestration, you’ll own the software layer that makes our infrastructure reproducible, scalable, and reliable across data centers. This is a senior, hands-on role focused on building systems not operating them. You’ll work close to the metal designing OS images, building provisioning pipelines, and automating cluster bring-up from scratch. Your work will define how quickly we can turn new capacity into usable compute. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Zero-to-cluster automation Build workflows that take new hardware from unprovisioned to fully operational cluster. Provisioning systems Design PXE-based or equivalent systems for imaging and lifecycle management. Reproducible infrastructure — Ensure clusters deploy consistently across data centers. RESPONSIBILITIES Own the end-to-end automation of cluster bring-up and lifecycle management. Build and maintain OS images, provisioning systems, and configuration pipelines. Deploy and operate cluster orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, Slurm, or similar). Design systems for reproducibility across sites and hardware generations. Automate upgrades, rollouts, and failure recovery. Optimize system performance, including GPU utilization and networking. Partner with hardware and network teams to validate and improve system b

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. At Baseten, we are building the global operating system for distributed, heterogeneous AI hardware. We believe that as LLM and multi-modal workloads scale, the network is the computer. We are looking for foundational engineers to lead our GPU Networking efforts, making RDMA a first-class building block in our infrastructure and unlocking the next generation of distributed inference optimizations. THE OPPORTUNITY Networking and compute are no longer separate disciplines; they are converging. The massive throughput of H100, B200, and NVL72 architectures enables and demands a new approach where communication is co-optimized alongside computation. We are entering an era where the network is an active accelerator, leveraging smart hardware offloads and direct interconnects to ensure that data movement operates at wire-speed. In this role, you will go beyond network configuration to architect the software fabric that unifies thousands of GPUs into a cohesive operating system. While you will leverage the best of the open-source ecosystem, you won't be limited by it. Where off-the-shelf solutions stop, you will build from scratch, engineering the primitives required to co-optimize communication and compute for Disaggregated Serving, Wide Expert Parallelism (WideEP), and lightening cold starts. WHAT YOU'LL DO Make RDMA First-Class: You will work on integrating RDMA/RoCE/InfiniBand capabilities directly into our inference stack,

What you’ll do Act as the technical lead for large parts of the scanner platform: system architecture, codebase structure, and long-term maintainability. Own core runtime foundations: distributed control, state management, fault handling, and reliability. Drive engineering rigor: testability, code quality, review standards, performance regression prevention, and release processes. Build robust observability: logs, metrics, traces, and replayable diagnostics (with privacy constraints). Collaborate with hardware and recon/ML teams to define interfaces, data contracts, timing/synchronization, and failure modes. Lead complex refactors (e.g., message passing / RPC boundaries, modularization, concurrency model) without halting forward progress. What we’re looking for Deep software architecture experience for real-world systems: robotics, instrumentation, medical devices, or other complex distributed products. Strong Python and concurrency background (asyncio, multiprocessing, profiling, performance engineering). Track record of shipping systems that are observable, debuggable, and resilient. Strong technical leadership: clarity, pragmatic trade-offs, and mentoring. Useful experience Building but rock-solid systems: clear interfaces (gRPC/protobuf or equivalent), strong state modeling, and failure handling. High-leverage engineering habits on a lean team: good tests, CI, reproducible dev environments, and fast code review. Practical performance + concurrency work in Python (asyncio, profiling, multiprocessing) and comfort debugging distributed behavior. Security-minded device software: safe defaults, encrypted data paths, and disciplined handling of PII/PHI. Operational thinking: remote updates/management, excellent logging, and diagnostics that make real hardware debuggable.

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

About the Team 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

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 lead the engineering, characterization, and productionization of flexible and compliant components in robotic platforms. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams to translate material concepts into engineered subsystems that meet functional, durability, and manufacturing requirements. This role focuses on understanding how soft materials behave in dynamic mechanical systems — including fatigue, creep, hysteresis, wear, and environmental degradation — and designing assemblies that perform consistently at scale. You will work with materials such as elastomers, foams, thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPUs), engineered fabrics, knitted and woven textiles, cables, and other flexible load-bearing or transmission elements, integrating them with rigid hardware, sensors, and actuators using fabrication methods such as bonding, molding, lamination, and sewn assemblies. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Design and integrate compliant or flexible materials into mechanical subsystems and rigid hardware interfaces. Leverage FEA tools to characterize material behavior under operational loads, including tension, compression, abrasion, fatigue, and environmental exposure. Develop test methods and validation protocols to evaluate durability, performance, and failure modes of soft components. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transition early prototypes into manufacturable designs. Source and evaluate materials in collaboratio

About the Team The Release Engineer team is responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power software delivery—from CI/CD pipelines and artifact management to release automation and fleet telemetry. We ensure software across bootloaders, firmware, operating systems, and cloud services is built reproducibly, validated rigorously, and released safely at scale. About the Role As a Release Engineer, you’ll design, build, and operate release infrastructure that enables reliable, secure, and traceable software delivery across complex multi-component systems. You’ll partner closely with embedded, cloud, and QA teams to ensure that every build—from development to OTA deployment—is fast, verifiable, and production-ready. We’re looking for engineers who take pride in automation, build reproducibility, and system reliability—and who enjoy building the connective tissue that allows hardware and software to ship together seamlessly. 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: Design and operate CI/CD pipelines for multi-component builds (bootloader, firmware, OS images, backend, companion apps) using hermetic toolchains. Define versioning and branching strategies; automate promotions, changelogs, and artifact retention. Integrate unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results; quarantine flaky tests, auto-bisect failures, and block unsafe promotions. Build A/B OTA update flows with verity and health checks; run staged rollouts and canaries; implement safe rollback and roll-forward strategies. Implement code signing for binaries and firmware, generate SBOMs, run vulnerability scanning, and attach build attestations and provenance. Manage dashboards and alerts for build health, promotion latency, failure rates, and fleet update telemetry. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building and operating buil

About the Team We’re hiring software engineers to make OpenAI’s networking teams more productive. These teams build and operate the high-performance networking systems that support OpenAI’s training and inference infrastructure at frontier scale. About the Role We’re looking for someone who cares deeply about the developer experience of engineers working on complex infrastructure systems — especially around build systems, test architecture, release pipelines, and reliable development workflows. This role will be embedded with OpenAI’s networking team: making it faster, safer, and easier for engineers to build, test, validate, and ship changes across multi-server, networked, and hardware-adjacent environments. In this role you will: Improve development workflows for engineers building and operating OpenAI’s networking systems Design and improve continuous deployment, release, and validation pipelines Build and maintain test harnesses for multi-server, networked, and hardware-backed environments Improve iteration speed across C++, Python, and build-system-heavy codebases Partner with engineers to identify friction in CI, testing, debugging, and deployment workflows Drive testing and reliability strategy for infrastructure components that support large-scale training and inference workloads Work closely with centralized developer experience teams while staying deeply embedded with the networking engineers closest to the systems You might thrive in this role if: You are motivated by helping other engineers move faster and with more confidence You have experience with CI/CD, release pipelines, testing infrastructure, or build systems You are comfortable moving between C++, Python, and build systems such as CMake, Bazel, or Blaze You enjoy building test harnesses, automation, and workflow improvements for complex systems You do not need to be a networking expert, but you are excited to learn enough about the domain to make the team meaningfully more effective When you see

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE Baseten is seeking talented and experienced Software Engineers to join our Observability team within the Infrastructure organization. As an early member of the Observability Team, you will be pivotal in building and shaping the observability experience for our internal and external customers. By joining this team, you’ll have a direct impact on the reliability and operational excellence of Basetens product systems. As Baseten scales its infrastructure across different cloud providers and diverse hardware, the volume and complexity of operational data is growing by orders of magnitude. This team is responsible for building high-throughput ingest pipelines, cost-efficient storage, and agentic diagnostic tools to ensure that we can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in minutes rather than hours, even as the systems they operate become more complex. RESPONSIBILITIES Design and build scalable telemetry ingest and storage pipelines for metrics, logs, and traces across Baseten’s multi-cloud infrastructure Own and evolve core observability platforms, driving migrations and architectural improvements that improve reliability, reduce cost, and scale with organizational growth Build instrumentation libraries, SDKs, and integrations that make it easy for engineering teams to emit high-quality telemetry from their services Drive alerting and SLO infrastructure that enables teams to define, monitor, and respond to reliabi

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE: Baseten’s Model Performance (MP) team is responsible for ensuring the models running on our platform are fast, reliable, and cost‑efficient. As part of this team, you’ll focus on Model APIs — the infrastructure powering our hosted API endpoints for the latest open‑source models. This work spans distributed systems, model serving, and developer experience. You’ll join a small, high‑impact team operating at the intersection of product, model performance, and infra, helping to define how developers interact with AI models at scale. RESPONSIBILITIES: Design, build, and operate the Model APIs surface with focus on advanced inference capabilities: structured outputs (JSON mode, grammar-constrained generation), tool/function calling and multi-modal serving Profile and optimize TensorRT-LLM kernels, analyze CUDA kernel performance, implement custom CUDA operators, tune memory allocation patterns for maximum throughput and optimize communication patterns across multi-GPU setups Productionize performance improvements across runtimes with deep understanding of their internals: speculative decoding implementations, guided generation for structured outputs, custom scheduling and routing algorithms for high-performance serving Build comprehensive benchmarking frameworks that measure real-world performance across different model architectures, batch sizes, sequence lengths, and hardware configurations Productionize performa

What you’ll do Design and implement secure cloud pipelines that ingest very large scan datasets (multi-terabyte), reliably and resumably. Build orchestration for GPU-accelerated reconstruction and analysis with strong retry semantics, idempotency, and cost controls. Define end-to-end data lifecycle for medical imaging: raw vs intermediate vs derived artifacts, retention policies, and reproducibility. Implement security + compliance primitives appropriate for HIPAA/PHI: encryption in transit/at rest, key management, least privilege, audit logs, and access reviews. Build operational tooling: monitoring, alerting, runbooks, and incident-driven improvements for a growing device fleet. What we’re looking for Strong experience with cloud batch/queueing/orchestration, storage systems, and data pipeline reliability. Experience shipping production systems that handle large data volumes and failure-prone networks. Practical security mindset (least privilege, secrets, audit logging) and comfort operating in compliance-constrained environments. Useful experience Building reliable data pipelines at scale (queues/orchestration, resumable uploads, GPU batch execution) with strong observability. Security + privacy by default: encryption, least-privilege access, auditing, and practical HIPAA/PHI guardrails. Owning the “boring” backend details that keep a lean team moving: schemas/migrations, cost controls, retries, and runbooks. Understanding compute tradeoffs across hardware options, and specifying appropriate cloud resources.

About the Team The Storage Infrastructure team builds and operates the storage foundation behind OpenAI’s most demanding workloads. We work directly with research to design storage systems for rapidly evolving experiments, while also powering production at scale. We own the platform end to end: backend systems, user-facing services and APIs, and the control planes that manage how data is placed, moved, and retained over time. Our stack spans cloud and in-house object stores across very different workload profiles, from GPU-attached systems to dedicated storage hardware. We also build the federation layer that unifies these backends behind a simple interface and routes each workload to the right storage solution. About the Role You will help build the storage platform that powers OpenAI’s research and production systems. This is a hands-on infrastructure role for engineers who want to work on deeply technical systems at scale and own them in production. You’ll work across object storage, cross-region data movement, lifecycle management, and the federation layer that provides a unified interface across multiple backends. Much of our stack runs on Kubernetes, and we primarily build services in Rust. In this role, you will: Build and operate storage services that underpin OpenAI’s research infrastructure Develop object storage systems across cloud and in-house environments Build systems for cross-region data movement, replication, and recovery Design lifecycle management capabilities that keep data durable, available, and cost-effective Evolve the federation layer that unifies multiple backend systems behind a simple interface Improve performance, reliability, and operational excellence across the platform Collaborate closely with researchers and infrastructure teams to support rapidly evolving workloads You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience building or operating distributed systems in production Have worked on storage infrastructure, object stores, dist