Hardware Tools Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team within OpenAI’s Consumer Devices group. We study how AI systems perceive people and their surroundings, and we turn that research into capabilities for future products. Our work spans machine learning, sensing, and hardware, with a focus on building systems that work beyond controlled environments. About the Role We’re looking for a machine learning engineer to help shape how future AI systems understand the physical world and the people in it. The role focuses on multimodal perception and authentication, bringing together signals from cameras, microphones, and other sensors. You’ll work with specialized perception models and larger multimodal models, and partner with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to bring new research into real-world systems. This role is based in San Francisco. We work in the office three days per week and offer relocation assistance. In this role, you will: Research and develop multimodal perception and authentication methods across visual, audio, and other sensing signals. Explore how specialized perception models and larger multimodal models can work together. Design data, training, and evaluation approaches that improve performance in real-world conditions. Study model behavior, robustness, and failure modes across sensing, data, and deployment environments. Integrate and validate new capabilities in real-time or resource-constrained systems. Work with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to turn research into working systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong background in computer vision, audio or speech machine learning, multimodal learning, or sensing. Have experience developing specialized machine learning models, larger multimodal models, or both. Have brought research ideas into practical systems, prototypes, or products. Know how to design experiments, build evaluations, and investigate model behavior. Have wo

About the Team Our mission at OpenAI is to discover and enact the path to safe, beneficial AGI. To do this, we believe that many technical breakthroughs are needed in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, large-scale optimization, active learning, and other areas. The team builds the performance-critical systems that allow OpenAI's models to run efficiently across a diverse set of AI accelerators. We work across the inference stack, from low-level kernels and compilers through model execution, to unlock the full capabilities of the underlying hardware. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Trainium, you will help bring OpenAI's inference workloads to AWS Trainium and build the software stack required to run cutting-edge frontier models efficiently on the platform. This is a deeply technical, cross-stack role spanning kernels, compilers, and model execution. You will work on the systems needed to support OpenAI's inference stack on Trainium, including developing and optimizing high-performance kernels, improving compiler support, and enabling efficient execution of the model forward pass. You'll work closely with engineers across inference, compilers, kernels, and ML systems to identify performance bottlenecks and build the software needed to take full advantage of Trainium. The work may range from low-level hardware-specific optimization to compiler and runtime improvements to integrating new model architectures into the inference stack. If you enjoy working at the intersection of ML systems, compilers, kernels, and accelerator hardware, this role is for you. We're looking for engineers who are self-directed, comfortable operating across abstraction layers, and excited to solve challenging performance problems for frontier-scale AI systems. In This Role, You Will Build and optimize OpenAI's inference stack for AWS Trainium. Develop high-performance kernels for critical model operations and workloads. Extend and improve compiler support to efficiently target

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 At OpenAI, the User Safety & Risk Operations (USRO) team helps protect our products and users from abuse, fraud, safety risks, and other forms of misuse. We operate at the front line of real-world safety and risk management, translating user and operational signals into timely decisions, effective interventions, and improvements to our systems. This role sits on a team focused on building operational capacity for new, ambiguous, and fast-moving company priorities. The team defines what needs to be built, creates the operating model to support it, and works with partner teams to make the work scalable and durable over time. About the Role We are looking for a senior program manager to build the safety, quality, and risk operations supporting a new category of consumer devices. You will translate ambiguous product risks and evolving requirements into practical operating models, workflows, escalation paths, launch-readiness plans, and cross-functional decision-making. This is a foundational role: the systems you build will shape how OpenAI launches, monitors, and improves a new category of consumer devices safely at scale. You will help establish how potential safety incidents, product-quality concerns, sensitive customer escalations, privacy-sensitive issues, and other emerging device risks are identified, investigated, resolved, and incorporated into product and operational improvements. You will turn incomplete requirements into practical workflows, decision rights, launch plans, quality controls, measurement, and durable ownership. The role centers on program building, operational judgment, and execution. We welcome candidates from product safety, quality assurance, regulatory operations, technical program management, healthcare, medical devices, aerospace, consumer technology, and other environments involving complex products or regulated risks. Direct consumer-hardware experience is helpful but not required. The strongest candidates learn unfam

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Through strategic partnerships and self-built campuses, we are scaling one of the world's fastest-growing AI infrastructure platforms. The Supply Chain organization ensures critical infrastructure components—from compute systems and networking equipment to integrated rack solutions—are sourced, manufactured, qualified, and delivered with the speed and reliability required to support frontier AI development. We partner closely with Hardware Engineering, Manufacturing Quality Engineering, Infrastructure Delivery, Hardware Operations, Finance, and suppliers worldwide to build a resilient, scalable supply chain capable of supporting rapid infrastructure expansion. As Industrial Compute continues to grow, Supply Chain serves as the operational bridge between engineering innovation and large-scale infrastructure deployment. About the Role We are seeking a Supply Chain Manager to lead strategic execution across sourcing, supplier operations, manufacturing quality, and infrastructure delivery for OpenAI's AI infrastructure portfolio. This role will oversee a multidisciplinary team responsible for strategic sourcing, manufacturing quality engineering, and technical program management while partnering closely with engineering, finance, hardware operations, and deployment teams. You will drive supplier strategy, manufacturing readiness, production planning, quality performance, and operational execution across the full hardware lifecycle. Success requires balancing long-term supplier strategy with day-to-day execution. You'll establish scalable operating mechanisms, strengthen supplier partnerships, manage complex cross-functional programs, and ensure OpenAI can rapidly deploy AI infrastructure without compromising quality, cost, or reliability. This is a people leadership role responsible for developing a high-performing organization while driving operati

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 OpenAI’s Infrastructure Operations team is responsible for the availability, reliability, and operational excellence of one of the world’s largest AI infrastructure networks. The team owns day-to-day operations of production AI networks across Industrial Compute's data centers, working with colocation providers, deployment teams, and hardware vendors to deliver highly available GPU infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads. About the Role We are seeking an Infrastructure Operations Engineer to operate and improve the large-scale Ethernet fabrics that support GPU clusters, storage systems, and management infrastructure. This role combines hands-on production operations with automation, observability, and incident response across a global AI network. The ideal candidate has experience operating high-availability data center, cloud, AI, or HPC networks and can move comfortably from physical-layer troubleshooting to routing and fabric behavior, change execution, and root-cause analysis. You will partner closely with network architecture, systems engineering, GPU engineering, storage engineering, security, deployment, site operations, service providers, colocation partners, and hardware vendors to raise reliability and reduce operational toil. Key Responsibilities Own the operational health, availability, and reliability of production AI network infrastructure across Industrial Compute's data centers. Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve network incidents while meeting service-level objectives (SLOs), reducing Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and minimizing Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR). Operate and maintain large-scale Ethernet fabrics supporting GPU compute, storage, and management networks. Execute production network changes, maintenance windows, and capacity expansions with minimal customer impact. Manage the hardware lifecycle, including switch and optics replacements, RMA coordination, software upgrades, and preventive maintenance. Support new A

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Working alongside our cloud partners, infrastructure providers, and internal engineering teams, we operate hyperscale AI campuses that support the training and deployment of frontier AI models. The Site Operations team serves as OpenAI's on-site operational presence, helping ensure campuses operate safely, efficiently, and in alignment with Industrial Compute standards. We work closely with Hardware Operations, Infrastructure Delivery, Network Operations, Security, Facilities, Construction, and our infrastructure partners to support day-to-day site execution and maintain operational readiness. As Industrial Compute continues to expand globally, Site Operations plays a critical role in ensuring each campus is prepared to support reliable AI infrastructure at scale. About the Role We are seeking a Site Operations Technician to support the daily operation of Industrial Compute campuses. This role acts as OpenAI's on-site technical representative, helping coordinate activities across hardware operations, facilities, construction, logistics, security, and external service providers. You will perform routine site inspections, support asset tracking, coordinate vendor activities, assist with operational readiness, document site conditions, and help ensure infrastructure issues are identified and resolved quickly. The ideal candidate enjoys working in highly technical environments, is detail-oriented, and thrives in fast-paced operational settings where no two days are the same. Key Responsibilities Perform routine walkthroughs of Industrial Compute facilities to verify operational readiness and identify potential issues. Monitor site conditions and report abnormalities involving hardware spaces, network rooms, utilities, logistics areas, and common infrastructure. Support coordination of vendors, contractors, and partner organizations performing work o

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

This role will support the fleet infrastructure team at OpenAI. The fleet team focuses on running the world’s largest, most reliable, and frictionless GPU fleet to support OpenAI’s general purpose model training and deployment. Work on this team ranges from Maximizing GPUs doing useful work by building user-friendly scheduling and quota systems Running a reliable and low maintenance platform by building push-button automation for kubernetes cluster provisioning and upgrades Supporting research workflows with service frameworks and deployment systems Ensuring fast model startup times though high performance snapshot delivery across blob storage down to hardware caching Much more! About the Role As an engineer within Fleet infrastructure, you will design, write, deploy, and operate infrastructure systems for model deployment and training on one of the world’s largest GPU fleet. The scale is immense, the timelines are tight, and the organization is moving fast; this is an opportunity to shape a critical system in support of OpenAI's mission to advance AI capabilities responsibly. 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, implement and operate components of our compute fleet including job scheduling, cluster management, snapshot delivery, and CI/CD systems. Interface with researchers and product teams to understand workload requirements Collaborate with hardware, infrastructure, and business teams to provide a high utilization and high reliability service You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience with hyperscale compute systems Possess strong programming skills Have experience working in public clouds (especially Azure) Have experience working in Kubernetes Execution focused mentality paired with a rigorous focus on user requirements As a bonus, have an understanding of AI/ML workloads About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI resea

About the Team OpenAI is helping build the infrastructure that powers the next generation of artificial intelligence. Through Stargate, we are developing and operating large-scale AI compute campuses that require world-class execution across data center design, construction, commissioning, and operations. The Infrastructure Operations team is responsible for bringing AI infrastructure online and ensuring it operates reliably at scale. We partner closely with hardware, network, deployment, construction, and operations teams to deliver mission-critical environments capable of supporting frontier AI workloads. As our footprint expands, operational excellence becomes increasingly important to ensuring safe, reliable, and efficient campus operations. About the Role We are seeking a Facilities Operations Manager to support the commissioning, operational readiness, and long-term operation of next-generation AI data center campuses. This role sits at the intersection of construction, commissioning, hardware deployment, and facilities operations. You will be responsible for ensuring mission-critical infrastructure is prepared to support hardware deployment, transitioned successfully into production operations, and maintained to the highest standards of reliability and availability. You will lead day-to-day operational execution across electrical, mechanical, controls, and supporting infrastructure systems while partnering closely with commissioning teams, site operators, vendors, and engineering organizations. This role requires a strong blend of technical depth, operational leadership, and cross-functional execution. Key Responsibilities Lead day-to-day operations of mission-critical facility infrastructure across AI compute campuses. Own operational readiness activities supporting new campus deployments and infrastructure expansion. Partner with commissioning teams to transition facilities from construction and startup into steady-state operations. Develop, implement, and

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 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