Hardware Tools Engineer in San Francisco

About the Team OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is embarking on a journey to build the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. The Infrastructure team is central to this mission, setting the core strategy and implementing the vision. From site selection to deployment to operations, this team sits at the intersection of commercial, technical, and operational domains, interacting with experts and executives inside and outside of OpenAI. We design and operate mission-critical facilities that support cutting-edge AI workloads at scale. About the Role We are seeking a Facilities Operations Lead to support the commissioning, deployment, and long-term operation of our next-generation AI data centers. This role bridges the interface between data center construction and hardware landing, ensuring seamless integration of mission-critical infrastructure with hardware deployment timelines. You will define and execute commissioning plans, support infrastructure bring-up, and take ownership of operations and maintenance for cutting-edge, large-scale, AI data centers. You will collaborate closely with design, construction, and hardware teams to define repeatable processes for new data center builds and lead hands-on operations to uphold the performance and reliability of our deployed infrastructure. Key Responsibilities Define and execute sequences of operations, commissioning steps, and bring-up processes for mission-critical data center facilities. Interface with the design and hardware teams to define deployment procedures tailored to each data center and hardware configuration. Oversee installation, commissioning, and operational readiness of large-scale data center campuses. Manage monitoring, maintenance, and quality control of the data center infrastructure, including high-performance liquid cooling systems. Develop on-site operations staffing strategy. Develop and enforce procedures for planed and unplanned downtime and SLAs for critical

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Working alongside leading cloud providers, engineering firms, construction partners, utilities, and equipment manufacturers, we are delivering hyperscale AI campuses that enable the next generation of frontier AI models. The Strategic Sourcing team develops and executes the commercial strategies that ensure our infrastructure programs have reliable access to the equipment, materials, and strategic partners needed to deliver at unprecedented scale. We partner closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Design Engineering, Hardware Operations, Finance, Legal, and our external suppliers to build a resilient global supply network capable of supporting Industrial Compute's long-term growth. As we continue expanding globally, strategic sourcing becomes a critical competitive advantage, ensuring our infrastructure programs remain cost-effective, resilient, and capable of executing against aggressive deployment timelines. About the Role We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Manager, Data Center Infrastructure to lead sourcing strategy for the critical infrastructure systems that power Industrial Compute campuses. This role will develop commercial strategies, negotiate strategic supplier agreements, and manage relationships across engineering, construction, manufacturing, and infrastructure partners responsible for delivering mission-critical facilities. You will work closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Engineering, Finance, Construction, and external suppliers to ensure Industrial Compute has the capacity, supplier relationships, and commercial frameworks required to support rapid global expansion. The ideal candidate has experience sourcing major infrastructure systems for hyperscale data centers, mission-critical facilities, industrial construction, semiconductor manufacturing, energy infrastructure, or similarly comple

About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is building the world's most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Working alongside leading cloud providers, engineering firms, construction partners, utilities, and equipment manufacturers, we are delivering hyperscale AI campuses that enable the next generation of frontier AI models. The Strategic Sourcing team develops and executes the commercial strategies that ensure our infrastructure programs have reliable access to the equipment, materials, and strategic partners needed to deliver at unprecedented scale. We partner closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Design Engineering, Hardware Operations, Finance, Legal, and our external suppliers to build a resilient global supply network capable of supporting Industrial Compute's long-term growth. As we continue expanding globally, strategic sourcing becomes a critical competitive advantage, ensuring our infrastructure programs remain cost-effective, resilient, and capable of executing against aggressive deployment timelines. About the Role We are seeking a Strategic Sourcing Manager, Data Center Infrastructure to lead sourcing strategy for the critical infrastructure systems that power Industrial Compute campuses. This role will develop commercial strategies, negotiate strategic supplier agreements, and manage relationships across engineering, construction, manufacturing, and infrastructure partners responsible for delivering mission-critical facilities. You will work closely with Infrastructure Delivery, Capacity Planning, Engineering, Finance, Construction, and external suppliers to ensure Industrial Compute has the capacity, supplier relationships, and commercial frameworks required to support rapid global expansion. The ideal candidate has experience sourcing major infrastructure systems for hyperscale data centers, mission-critical facilities, industrial construction, semiconductor manufacturing, energy infrastructure, or similarly comple

About OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models, but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably, efficiently, and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow, we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem. About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform. We build the control planes, APIs, secure partner-side execution environments, evaluation systems, artifact pipelines, and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI inference, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, security, and external partnerships. About the Role We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes. You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable, make performance results reproducible, and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information. This is a deeply cross-stack role, combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and

About the Team We are building general-purpose robotics. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure. In the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research. About the Role As a Firmware Engineer, you will define and drive the architecture of embedded systems for next-generation hardware products. You will own foundational firmware decisions across real-time execution, device bring-up, hardware interfaces, fault handling, safety mechanisms, and production readiness. We’re looking for someone with deep experience building safety-critical or high-consequence systems, where failures can have meaningful consequences. You should be comfortable reasoning about risk, designing for diagnosability and graceful degradation, and creating engineering practices that raise the reliability bar for the entire team. You should also be unusually good at moving fast. Sometimes the right answer is a carefully reviewed architecture that will endure for years; sometimes it is getting a rough-but-useful prototype working by the end of the afternoon so the team can learn something concrete tomorrow. We value engineers who know the difference, make that call well, and can operate credibly in both modes. You will be both a technical leader and a hands-on builder: setting direction, reviewing critical designs, unblocking the hardest problems, and writing production firmware when it matters most. Our embedded stack uses a lot of Rust. Extensive experience in the language is a big help! 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: Rapidly bring up new hardware and set execution pace for the team. Lead firmware architecture for embedded systems spanning boot, RTOS/runtime behav

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 the Team The Scaling team is responsible for the architectural and engineering backbone of OpenAI’s infrastructure. We design and deliver advanced systems that support the deployment and operation of cutting-edge AI models. Our work spans system software, networking, platform architecture, fleet-level monitoring, and performance optimization. About the Role We’re hiring an SW Engineer to enable production workloads and end-to-end testing on new platforms. This role will include creating new test harnesses and platform stress benchmarks, porting existing inference and training workloads to new, sometimes early-access, systems/hardware, analyzing performance and bottlenecks, and characterizing the end-to-end behavior of new systems (compute, comms, storage, control plane, and failure modes). Key Responsibilities Port and validate key inference and training workloads on new platforms/SKUs as they arrive; drive correctness, performance, and stability to an internal readiness bar. Build a suite of benchmarks and stress tests that capture real E2E behavior of our workloads by exercising all aspects of a system, including CPU, GPU, memory subsystem, frontend, scale-up, and scale-out networking (including WAN traffic, NVlink and RDMA collectives), storage, thermals, and any other relevant parts. Deep-dive performance on distributed training/inference: Collective performance and tuning (across NCCL/RCCL and internal libraries) Overlap of compute/communication, kernel-level bottlenecks, memory bandwidth and scheduling effects Create repeatable test harnesses that run in CI / lab environments and produce actionable outputs (pass/fail, performance score, regression detection). Partner with systems + fleet bring-up engineers to ensure the platform is not only stable and performant, but also operationally usable and scalable (containerization, K8s integration, telemetry hooks, failure triage loops). Work cross-functionally with vendors and internal stakeholders by producing

About the Team OpenAI’s Industrial Compute team is responsible for building and scaling large-scale compute capacity across first-party data centers, strategic partners, and industrial infrastructure environments. We focus on converting power, land, hardware, and operational execution into reliable compute capacity that can support frontier AI training and inference workloads. This team operates at the intersection of infrastructure delivery, hardware systems, utilities, supply chain, and capacity strategy—ensuring OpenAI can scale compute faster than traditional models allow. About the Role We are seeking a Tokens-as-a-Service (TaaS) Lead to drive the end-to-end conversion of industrial-scale infrastructure investments into usable token capacity for OpenAI workloads. In this role, you will own execution across complex compute programs where raw infrastructure capacity must be transformed into operational GPU throughput. You will coordinate across data center delivery, power, networking, hardware deployment, workload enablement, finance, and external partners to ensure capacity becomes productive tokens as quickly and efficiently as possible. This role is ideal for someone who can bridge physical infrastructure delivery with compute utilization outcomes. Success requires strong systems thinking, elite program leadership, and the ability to drive accountability across internal teams and strategic partners. In this role, you will Lead Tokens-as-a-Service programs across industrial compute environments, including first-party and partner-owned capacity. Convert delivered power, space, and hardware capacity into production-ready token throughput. Build integrated execution plans spanning construction, power energization, rack deployment, networking, cluster readiness, and workload onboarding. Partner with infrastructure engineering, hardware, networking, finance, supply chain, and operations teams. Drive external providers, EPCs, OEMs, utilities, and strategic partners t

About the Team OpenAI is building the infrastructure foundation for the next generation of AI. The Data Center Engineering team defines the strategy, reference architectures, technical requirements, and delivery standards for the large-scale data centers that support OpenAI research, products, and infrastructure partners. As a Data Center Infrastructure Engineering Program Manager, you will help turn complex infrastructure strategy into executable programs across electrical, mechanical, controls, network, hardware, construction, commissioning, deployment, and operations workstreams. You will partner with research, hardware engineering, data center engineering, site development, supply chain, security, EHS, finance, legal, operations, and external delivery partners to bring OpenAI's infrastructure vision to life. About the Role We are looking for an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) to lead assigned infrastructure programs focused on production and non-production network integration, controls coordination, and the design and deployment of data hall or whitespace facilities. The EPM will support functional Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) across network, controls, structural, electrical, and mechanical disciplines. Key responsibilities include coordinating assigned workstreams and program controls, maintaining risks and interfaces, and supporting readiness within the network and data hall deployment track. The ideal candidate thrives on bringing structure to complex environments characterized by ambiguous technical requirements, large partner ecosystems, tight deadlines, and high operational stakes. This individual must be adept at keeping teams aligned on decisions, risks, dependencies, schedules, and readiness criteria, and escalating gaps or decision points when needed. Candidates should have a proven track record of managing technically challenging engineering programs across major lifecycle phases, including design, validation, procurement, construction, c

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 OpenAI’s Stargate and 3P Engineering teams are responsible for building and scaling the external infrastructure ecosystem that powers advanced AI systems. We work across hyperscalers, colocation providers, cloud partners, and strategic third-party operators to turn contracted capacity into production-ready compute. Our scope spans the full lifecycle of external deployments: commercial alignment, technical readiness, network integration, hardware enablement, operational readiness, and long-range scaling strategy. As OpenAI’s infrastructure footprint expands globally, we need leaders who can convert complex partner environments into reliable, high-velocity capacity for training and inference workloads. About the Role We are seeking a Technical Program Manager, Token-as-a-Service (TaaS) to lead delivery of external compute capacity that directly serves OpenAI model workloads. In this role, you will own complex cross-functional programs that transform third-party infrastructure into usable tokens at scale. You will partner across engineering, capacity planning, networking, hardware, finance, product, and external providers to ensure that deployed capacity translates into real production throughput. This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure execution, systems readiness, and business impact. Success requires strong technical fluency, elite program management, and the ability to drive accountability across internal teams and external partners. This is a high-visibility role with direct impact on OpenAI’s ability to scale model training and inference globally. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model of 3 days in office per week. Relocation assistance is available. Key Responsibilities Lead end-to-end delivery programs that convert external infrastructure capacity into production-ready token supply. Own readiness across compute, storage, networking, security, and operational dependencies for third-party environments. Build

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 Us: AI needs a new infrastructure layer. We're building it at Modal. Every era of computing brought new workloads that previous infrastructure couldn't support: mainframes, databases, and the cloud. Each time, the company that rebuilt the layer underneath defined the decade. AI is no different, except it touches everything instead of one slice, and the window to build the layer underneath it is open right now. Our customers include category-defining companies like Lovable , Ramp , Cognition, DoorDash, and Suno. They rely on Modal for instant GPU access, sub-second container starts, and native storage, so it's simple to serve low-latency inference, fine-tune models, and access production-ready sandboxes at scale. We recently raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures. We've crossed $300M+ ARR and grown fivefold since September. Our team includes creators of popular open-source projects (e.g., Seaborn , Luig i ), academic researchers, international olympiad medalists, and experienced engineering and product leaders with decades of experience. The Role: We are looking for strong engineers with experience and interest in designing, building, and maintaining the novel, high-performance systems that make up our serverless platform. Specifically, you'll be working on Modal's machines layer: the fleet of bare metal and cloud hosts that every Function, Sandbox, and training job runs on, and the control plane that provisions, images, monitors, and repairs them. You'll automate the integration of new capacity from a growing set of hardware providers; from auditing and benchmarking hosts and clusters, to maintaining our machine images, configuring GPUs, RDMA, networking, and storage, and getting machines into production. You'll build the automation that keeps the fleet healthy without human intervention: detecting bad GPUs, thermals, and disks. You'll dig into whatever is between the hardware and the software that runs on

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE This role owns Baseten's relationships and market intelligence across hyperscalers and strategic neoclouds, including NVIDIA cloud partners. This is a technical and commercial role in equal measure: you'll evaluate capacity from the GPU to the data center, negotiate cost and terms with suppliers, and stay close enough to the market to develop and defend a real point of view on where it's heading. Given current market conditions, Baseten needs a much stronger pulse on this part of the market so we can track pricing, stay close to the right relationships, and move fast the moment more capacity is needed. This is a senior, experienced hire who will also help pair with and develop 1-2 junior to mid-level teammates covering the same space. WHAT YOU'LL DO Build and maintain deep relationships across hyperscalers and strategic neoclouds (including NVIDIA cloud partners), working each organization from top to bottom rather than a single point of contact Maintain a consistent, "top of mind" presence with key accounts so Baseten is positioned to move quickly when capacity needs arise Evaluate capacity from the GPU to the data center — hardware generation, rack and node configuration, interconnect, power density, and cooling — so you know what a configuration will actually deliver, not just what the spec sheet claims Live in compute pricing daily: track rates by GPU generation, region, and contract term to keep Baseten inf

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Global Capacity Manager focused on TPUs at Baseten, you will lead the "engine room" for our non-NVIDIA accelerator fleet, architecting, securing, and optimizing the Google Cloud TPU (and broader emerging accelerator) capacity that powers our customers' AI workloads. You'll own the end-to-end journey of capacity management for this fleet, from securing large-scale TPU pod allocations to building the automation that ensures reliable uptime across multi-cloud environments. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want to bridge the gap between high-finance asset management and deep infrastructure engineering, with a specific focus on the TPU ecosystem. You will act as the fleet orchestrator for Google's TPU architecture, ensuring Baseten never experiences a capacity outage while maintaining elite unit economics as we diversify beyond NVIDIA. To be clear, this is a high-stakes engineering role. You will be hands-on with Kubernetes orchestration while also leading specialized pods focused on the latest generation of TPU hardware, like Google's Trillium (v6e) architecture, and partnering closely with the Model Performance (MP) team to ensure workloads are tuned for TPU-specific execution. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES The TPU Frontier: Architecting the infrastructure readiness and deployment strategy for Baseten's TPU clusters, including pod slicing and topology planning Global Workload Orchestration: Bui