Hardware Tools 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 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 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

The Fleet team at OpenAI supports the computing environment that powers our cutting-edge research and product development. We oversee large-scale systems that span data centers, GPUs, networking, and more, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency. Our work enables OpenAI’s models to operate seamlessly at scale, supporting both internal research and external products like ChatGPT. We prioritize safety, reliability, and responsible AI deployment over unchecked growth. About the Role The Software Engineer, Operating Systems & Orchestration will focus on building systems to manage hardware, configurations, vendors, and the people interacting with our infrastructure. You will design and develop solutions that integrate individual nodes and servers into unified clusters, directly contributing to advancing AI research by streamlining the overall research user experience. 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 and build systems to manage both cloud and bare-metal fleets at scale. Develop tools that integrate low-level hardware metrics with high-level job scheduling and cluster management algorithms. Leverage LLMs to coordinate vendor operations and optimize infrastructure workflows. Automate infrastructure processes, reducing repetitive toil and improving system reliability. Collaborate with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to ensure seamless integration across the stack. Continuously improve tools, automation, processes, and documentation to enhance operational efficiency. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong software engineering skills with experience in large-scale infrastructure environments. Possess broad knowledge of cluster-level systems (e.g., Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, cloud providers). Have deep expertise in server-level systems (e.g., systems, containerization, Chef,

About the Team Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprise and developers alike to use and access our start-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before. We focus on performant and efficient model inference, as well as accelerating research progression via model inference. About the Role We are looking for an engineer who wants to take the world's largest and most capable AI models and optimize them for use in a high-volume, low-latency, and high-availability production and research environment. In this role, you will: Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production. Work alongside researchers to enable advanced research through awesome engineering. Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack. Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability and then design and implement solutions to address the highest priority issues. Optimize our code and fleet of Azure VMs to utilize every FLOP and every GB of GPU RAM of our hardware. You might thrive in this role if you: Have an understanding of modern ML architectures and an intuition for how to optimize their performance, particularly for inference. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. Have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. Have or can quickly gain familiarity with PyTorch, NVidia GPUs and the software stacks that optimize them (e.g. NCCL, CUDA), as well as HPC technologies such as InfiniBand, MPI, NVLink, etc. Have experience architecting, building, observing, and debugging production distributed systems. Bonus point if worked on performance-critical distributed systems. Have need

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

About the Team: Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams. Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage. About the Role We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may not be the strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you. Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, t

About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the Role In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs. In this role, you will Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates. Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput. Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency. Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling. Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization. Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production systems. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve o

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 the Team The Post-Training Frontiers team is responsible for training the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world (GPT-Next). We train the flagship agentic models behind Codex, ChatGPT, and the API through large-scale reinforcement learning. The team’s work spans four areas. First, execution and science: working with teams across OpenAI to decide what can go into the final model and how, using scientific experiments and evals that are representative of the final pipeline so issues can be recognized early. Second, RL scaling: executing the final large-scale reinforcement learning run, making sure GPUs are used efficiently and training stays healthy. Third, research: improving horizontal capabilities like instruction following, factuality, memory, and multi-agent behavior, where the team’s broad visibility helps identify cross-cutting improvements across teams and domains. Fourth, engineering: maintaining the infrastructure stack and internal tools to ensure that both the final run and all integrations go as smoothly as possible and that the systems are easy to work with. About the Role This role focuses on keeping our frontier RL training runs fast, reliable, and unblocked. You will work across engineering and infrastructure problems as they emerge, from scaling and orchestration issues to inference bottlenecks, numerical problems, and hardware failures, as well as supporting large horizontal integrations in the big run, like multi-agent capabilities or memory. This is a role for a strong generalist who quickly learns anything needed for the task, has high attention to detail, debugs deeply, and is motivated by fixing the highest-impact problem in front of the team. In this role, you will: Keep large-scale async RL training runs moving by jumping into the most urgent engineering and infrastructure problems. Debug issues across training systems, inference, orchestration, scaling, and distributed infrastructure. Improve the reliability and efficiency of RL trai

About the Team The Frontier Systems team at OpenAI builds, launches, and supports the largest supercomputers in the world that OpenAI uses for its most cutting edge model training. We take data center designs, turn them into real, working systems and build any software needed for running large-scale frontier model trainings. Our mission is to bring up, stabilize and keep these hyperscale supercomputers reliable and efficient during the training of the frontier models. About the Role As a Software Engineer on the Frontier Systems team focused on power management, you will work on critical infrastructure to support cutting-edge research. With large-scale supercomputers consuming substantial amounts of power, managing this efficiently is key to maximizing computational capacity. This role is critical to ensuring that our cutting-edge research supercomputing infrastructure runs smoothly, while maintaining reliability and grid-level power stability. Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale. In this role, you will: Develop and implement system-level and software-level solutions to optimize power usage in large-scale supercomputers, ensuring efficient and reliable operations. Build automation to monitor power consumption patterns during training workloads and design algorithms to stabilize these fluctuations, preventing issues with grid reliability. Work with researchers and engineers to design tools for real-time monitoring, detection, and remediation of power-related hardware and system faults. Collaborate cross-functionally to translate complex electrical system requirements into code, while driving continuous improvements in power man

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role As a Supply Chain Program Manager, you will own material readiness and supply chain execution for critical hardware programs spanning custom silicon, systems, memory, storage, networking, and rack infrastructure. You will work cross-functionally with Engineering, Strategic Sourcing, Manufacturing Operations, Finance, Planning, Quality, and external suppliers to develop and execute scalable supply strategies that support aggressive product development and deployment timelines. This role requires deep understanding of hardware supply chains, material planning, NPI execution, supplier management, and operational scaling in constrained and rapidly evolving environments. In this role you will: Material Readiness & Supply Planning - Own end-to-end material readiness across NPI and production phases, including building the necessary framework and processes for enablement. Drive supply planning and execution for long lead-time and constrained commodities including ASICs, HBM, DDR, SSDs, networking, optics, power, thermal, and mechanicals. Build and manage material readiness plans aligned to proto/pre-EVT, EVT, DVT, PVT, and mass production schedules. Monitor supply health, lead times, inventory positions, allocation risk, and capacity constraints. Drive shortage management, allocation mitigation, and recovery planning. Coordinate supply commits, forecast alignment, and supply continuity planning with suppliers and manufacturing partners. Cross-Functional Program Ma

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We are seeking an experienced SoC Architect to lead the definition and development of next-generation custom AI silicon for edge deployments. This role will be responsible for shaping the architecture of highly efficient, high-performance SoCs optimized for machine learning inference and on-device intelligence. You will work cross-functionally with internal engineering teams and external ecosystem partners to translate product requirements into scalable silicon solutions, driving execution from concept through delivery. In this role you will: Define the architecture and technical roadmap for custom SoCs targeted for edge applications. Drive system-level tradeoff analysis across compute, memory, interconnect, power, thermal, and cost constraints. Architect energy-efficient ML compute subsystems optimized for inference workloads and real-world deployment environments. Collaborate with internal hardware, software, systems, and product teams to align architecture with platform needs. Partner with external silicon vendors, IP providers, and manufacturing partners to execute development plans. Lead hardware/software co-design efforts to maximize performance per watt and end-to-end system efficiency. Guide implementation teams through microarchitecture, RTL development, validation, and bring-up phases. Operate effectively in agile development environments and help teams deliver against aggressive schedules and milestones. You might thrive in this role if: Proven exper

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role As a Hardware Chips Programs Manager at OpenAI, you will help bring our chips hardware roadmap to life, navigating an array of technical and partnership challenges. We’re looking for people excited to push the frontiers of computing by navigating technical explorations and are passionate about building. 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: Manage the design and implementation planning of our ML acceleration hardware, working across technical, cross-functional and external stakeholders Lead planning and scheduling of chip hardware designs with our strategic partners and vendors Coordinate and marshal internal resources and communication for efficient interaction with partners and vendors. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience as a technical program manager for data center hardware products (server, GPU, TPU, networking, storage and so on) Know the whole end-to-end system program management from concept, design, production, deployment into the data center Have some experience with System SW programs through NPI Want to help design some of the world’s largest supercomputing systems, working at the edge of complex hardware challenges Enjoy working with and enabling world-class AI Researchers and Engineers Are passionate about the technical program function, and enjoy independently owning and delivering on your tea

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. About the Role We are seeking a Operations Program Manager (OPM) to serve as the single-threaded operational leader for new hardware introductions (NPI) and production ramps across OpenAI’s AI infrastructure systems. This role combines hands-on execution with strategic ownership. You will be responsible for defining the operating model, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, setting the critical path, making informed tradeoffs, escalating decisively, and ensuring hardware programs deliver on schedule, quality, cost, and scalability. Success in this role requires comfort operating in ambiguity, influencing without authority, and driving alignment across internal teams and external partners—while keeping eyes firmly on long-term system scalability and repeatability. In this role, you will: Strategic & Leadership Ownership Act as the single-threaded owner for operational readiness across NPI and ramp, accountable for outcomes from early bring-up through sustained production Translate OpenAI’s infrastructure strategy and engineering objectives into clear operating plans, execution priorities, and decision frameworks Drive alignment across Engineering, Operations, Strategic Sourcing, Finance, Capacity Planning, and Executive stakeholders by framing tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations Proactively identify inflection points where decisions or investments are required to protect long-term scale, reliability, or cost targets Influence operational strategy with manufacturing par

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 are looking for an Operations Program Manager - Robotics Data Acquisition to own the day-to-day operating rhythm in our data collection facilities. You will work closely with operators, technicians, program managers, and engineers to keep rigs ready, campaigns moving, issues resolved, and performance improving. This is a hands-on operations role that requires you to be comfortable spending time on the floor, working through ambiguity, and using data to make the operation more reliable and efficient. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 5 days a week. In this role you will: Coordinate daily operations readiness across workstations, operators, materials. Track core operating metrics including utilization, cycle time, throughput, downtime, operator productivity, and data quality. Identify bottlenecks through workflow analysis, time studies, and capacity modeling, then drive practical fixes. Execute the rollout of new hardware, sensors, tools, and process changes with Engineering, Operations, Facilities, Supply Chain, and Safety. Identify equipment readiness issues and coordinate with technical support to keep workstations, and test equipment calibrated, configured, maintained, and ready for rollouts and evaluations. Lead root cause analysis for recurring operational issues and follow through on corrective actions. Provide operation input to create and maintain SOPs, work instructions, training materials, and process controls. Identify and flag resource constraints and manage issue escala