About the Team The Consumer Devices team at OpenAI builds end-to-end hardware and software systems that bring AI into the physical world. We work at the intersection of custom silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to deliver reliable, production-ready devices at scale. About the role We are looking for an Operating Systems Engineer to build and harden the OS foundations for OpenAI products. We are especially interested in experienced, passionate, and innovative operating systems developers who thrive on building foundational platform software and solving hard problems in security, privacy, performance, power, and reliability. You will work across the OS kernel, core OS services, security and privacy primitives, performance and power, and the frameworks that connect applications and UI to the system. This role emphasizes deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production. You will collaborate closely with embedded, firmware, hardware, application, and product engineering teams. Experience with hardware bring-up is a plus, but not required. What you will do Work on end-to-end OS capabilities spanning the OS kernel, userspace services, application frameworks, UI toolkits, and application-facing APIs. Develop, integrate, and maintain OS components, both kernel-bound and in userspace, including scheduling, memory management, filesystems, drivers, IPC/RPC mechanisms, and security-relevant subsystems. Build and maintain core OS services and daemons (init, service management, device discovery, networking primitives, time, logging, update hooks, crash handling, and so on). Design and implement security and privacy mechanisms: Secure boot and measured boot integration points (where applicable). Mandatory access control and sandboxing. Secrets management, secure storage, key handling, and least-privilege service design. Privacy-preserving telemetry, data minimization, and user-consent oriented system behaviors. Establish a perfo
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Software Systems Engineer in San Francisco
15 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
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About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We’re looking for a Robotics Control Systems Engineer to take on a foundational role within our robotics team. You’ll help architect, implement, tune, and verify the control infrastructure that enables intelligent, reliable, and responsive robot behavior. This is a deeply hands-on role focused on real-time systems, actuation, dynamics, low-level hardware interaction, and whole-robot performance. You’ll spend significant time working directly with robots onsite: debugging behavior, tuning subsystems, running experiments, and providing feedback across mechanical, electrical, and software teams. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 5 days a week. In this role, you will: Design and implement real-time control algorithms for robotic systems, including motion control, feedback loops, state estimation, actuator control, and subsystem tuning. Define the control architecture from low-level actuators and hardware interfaces through whole-robot behavior and policy. Identify and characterize actuator, hardware, and software parameters through rigorous experimentation, testing, commissioning, and verification. Work with machine learning engineers to implement reinforcement learning models. Collaborate across mechanical, electrical, and software teams to integrate control logic with sensing and actuation hardware. Help inform the mechanical and electrical design to maximize capability and flexibility. Create the control system architecture; determine the correct level of abstraction from actuators all the way up to whole-robot
About the Team OpenAI's Industrial Compute organization is responsible for planning, delivering, operating, and optimizing the compute infrastructure that powers frontier AI. As OpenAI scales toward becoming an intelligence utility, Industrial Compute coordinates a complex lifecycle spanning infrastructure strategy, capacity planning, provider partnerships, fleet operations, product demand, and financial planning. The organization manages one of the largest and fastest-growing compute footprints in the world, where decisions around capacity allocation, deployment readiness, utilization, reliability, and product demand directly impact product availability, customer experience, and business performance. The Capacity Systems team builds the software platforms, data systems, and automation frameworks that connect these functions into a shared operating model. We transform fragmented planning workflows into scalable systems that enable teams to understand what compute was contracted, delivered, healthy, allocated, and ultimately converted into business and research outcomes. About the Role We are seeking a Capacity Systems Software Engineer to build the platforms and services that power Industrial Compute planning, forecasting, optimization, and operational decision-making. In this role, you will design and develop software systems that connect infrastructure delivery, fleet health, capacity allocation, demand forecasting, deployment readiness, financial planning, and product consumption into a unified system of record. Your work will help OpenAI make better decisions about where compute should be deployed, how capacity should be allocated, and how infrastructure investments translate into business value. You will partner closely with Capacity Planning, Fleet Operations, Infrastructure Engineering, Product, Finance, Supply Chain, and Strategic Sourcing teams to replace spreadsheet-driven workflows with scalable software systems that enable visibility, automation, and dec
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. Our team works across systems software and product engineering to build reliable consumer devices and the platforms behind them. We develop the connectivity and networking foundations that support communication across OpenAI products and systems. About the Role As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on connectivity and networking, you will design, develop, and maintain the OS capabilities that enable reliable, secure, and efficient communication across OpenAI products and systems. Your work will span Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frameworks, IP networking, and advanced network services and policy. You’ll develop OS services, libraries, and interfaces for a broad range of connectivity needs, make design decisions across software boundaries, and carry solutions through development, integration, and production. In this role, you will: Build connectivity foundations: Design, implement, and maintain OS services, frameworks, and APIs for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and IP networking. Develop reusable network capabilities: Build connection management, network configuration and selection, service discovery, and routing capabilities. Enable secure communication: Develop network services and policies for secure communication, traffic management, and isolation across varied network environments. Resolve issues across the stack: Investigate correctness, concurrency, interoper
About the Team API Agents builds the shared agent harness, tools, and infrastructure that turn OpenAI’s frontier models into systems that can reliably complete real work. We carry the capabilities behind Codex into a much broader set of products and workflows across software engineering, research, finance, healthcare, enterprise operations, and more. Our work spans search and connected context, computer use, memory, delegation and multi-agent coordination, and safe execution. Sitting at the intersection of Research, Codex, infrastructure, and applied product teams, we build reusable agent capabilities that compound across the ecosystem. About the Role We are looking for an experienced backend software engineer to build the core systems behind the next generation of agents. You will design reliable services and abstractions that help agents find the right context, use tools and computers, retain knowledge, coordinate over long-running workflows, and take action safely. The role combines deep backend and infrastructure work with strong product judgment, with opportunities to work across agent runtimes, orchestration, search, execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, and evaluations. This is software and systems engineering rather than model training: success comes from strong backend fundamentals, high agency, and the ability to turn fast-moving research capabilities into dependable production primitives. In this role, you will: Design, build, and operate the shared agent harness and backend infrastructure that power long-running, high-value workflows across OpenAI and third-party products. Build reusable capabilities across search and connected context, computer use, memory, tool execution, delegation, subagents, and multi-agent orchestration. Establish the foundations agents need to operate safely in production, including secure execution environments, identity and permissions, observability, evaluations, reliability, and cost and latency effi
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 looking for a systems-minded engineer to help advance our kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design capabilities, with a particular focus on AI-assisted workflows and tooling. This person will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimized, and how future hardware-software systems are designed and evaluated. The role is ideal for someone who is excited by low-level performance work, but also sees AI and automation as powerful tools for accelerating engineering velocity. You will help define the future of kernel engineering in the era of AI-assisted development. In this role, you may: Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy. Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective. Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production. Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design. Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for sp
About the Team The Consumer Devices team at OpenAI builds end-to-end hardware and software systems that bring AI into the physical world. We work at the intersection of custom silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, cloud services, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and product design to deliver reliable, production-ready devices at scale. Within Consumer Devices, Hardware Engineering eXperience, or HEX, is a new bootstrapped team building the environments, applications, compute, product-data systems, and workflows that let hardware engineers do their work without needing to troubleshoot the machinery underneath. HEX owns virtual engineering environments, HPC/GPU compute, storage, networking, licensing, MCAD/ECAD/CAE applications, PLM, product data, automation, validation, and support as one connected system. About the Role As a Staff PLM & Engineering Applications Engineer, you will be one of the first technical builders of HEX and the primary counterpart to the HEX lead. You will own the engineering-application and product-data side of the hardware engineering experience, with an initial focus on NX, Teamcenter, licensing, parts import, integrations, packaging, validation, and user workflows. This is not a traditional Teamcenter administration role and not a Corporate IT application-support role. You will take complex, fragile workflows and turn them into reliable engineering systems. This role is highly hands-on and systems-oriented. You will not inherit a mature environment and support queue. You will help build a fresh one, replacing manual setup guides, tribal knowledge, repeated support issues, and team handoffs with tested automation and reliable workflows. In This Role, You Will Own the technical architecture, deployment, configuration, integration, validation, and long-term operation of NX and Teamcenter. Build reliable workflows for parts import, product-data migration, metadata quality, BOMs, revisions, lifecycle states, and releas
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 You will work on the systems software strategy and execution that brings new AI silicon from first power-on to a fully integrated system running production-representative models at expected functionality and performance. You will define how software exercises and validates compute, memory, interconnect, and I/O subsystems, then build the diagnostics, automation, and observability needed to find issues quickly. This role sits at the center of silicon, firmware, platform, systems, and workload teams. You will turn hardware specifications and performance targets into an end-to-end bringup plan, drive cross-functional debug, and establish the stress and regression infrastructure that makes each new platform reliable across operating environments. In this role, you will: Contribute to the end-to-end software bringup and validation strategy for new silicon and first-party systems. Define software-driven test coverage across compute, memory, interconnect, I/O, and their system-level interactions. Build diagnostics, test automation, telemetry, and regression infrastructure that accelerate first-silicon learning and issue isolation. Lead bringup from initial silicon arrival through board and system integration, docking, runtime enablement, and model execution. Design stress tests that characterize reliability, performance, and stability across workloads and operating conditions. Translate architecture specifications and performance models into measurable acceptance crit
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're seeking a Security Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end security foundation for OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems, working across hardware security, embedded security, system security, and practical deployment at data center scale. You will partner with silicon, hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and security teams to define and deliver system-level device trust. This includes boot integrity, device identity, provisioning, attestation, management-plane security, storage encryption, debug controls, firmware update and recovery, RMA, and decommissioning. You will be accountable for turning threat models into requirements, requirements into implementation, and implementation into validation evidence that can support launch decisions. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from early design through production deployment. Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across heterogeneous devices. Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up. Harden management
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're seeking a System Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will design, build, integrate, and validate low-level system software for the manageability and health of OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems. You will work across BMC, Linux, firmware interfaces, automation infra, boot and recovery, hardware diagnostics, telemetry, host and platform drivers, network software interfaces, and manufacturing and fleet readiness. A major part of this role is owning the acceptance path for partner-delivered system software: defining requirements, reviewing code and artifacts, reproducing builds, building tests, pushing fixes, and producing the evidence needed for launch decisions. This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will write and review low-level software, debug issues across hardware and software boundaries, build infra and automation to test and manage devices in lab, guide partner deliverables, build validation evidence, and help carry platforms from bring-up through production deployment. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Design, develop, and maintain low-level firmware and system software for first-party AI hardware manageability, including BMC software, Redfish services, gNMI telemetry, firmware update and recovery flows, BIOS/UEFI interactions, platform drivers, and hardware diagnostics. Own integration and acceptance of partner and ve
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’re looking for an experienced systems software engineer to help define and build the host software stack for our custom next-generation AI systems. You will work close to the hardware on performance-critical software, including Linux kernel drivers, high-throughput I/O paths, and system-scale networking and RDMA. This role spans architecture, implementation, platform bring-up, debugging, and performance optimization. You will work across hardware and software boundaries to make new systems usable end to end, from low-level device interfaces through userspace tooling and production validation. In this role you will: Design, implement, and debug host-side systems software for AI infrastructure, including Linux kernel drivers and supporting userspace components. Build and optimize software paths for high-throughput, low-latency communication, including RDMA and related networking functionality. Develop software around PCIe, DMA, NICs, accelerators, memory movement, and device interaction. Bring up new hardware platforms and diagnose complex issues across kernel, firmware, networking, and hardware boundaries. Build tooling for integration, testing, diagnostics, observability, qualification, and performance characterization. Collaborate with hardware, networking, and platform teams to define interfaces and integrate new capabilities. Work with external vendors where needed to integrate technologies and drive issues to resolution. Contribute across the systems sof
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 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’re looking for a software engineer to help build the design methodology, software abstractions, and infrastructure that enable a small silicon team to develop complex chips rapidly and with high confidence. You will turn evolving architecture and design needs into reusable tools and workflows that improve iteration speed, quality, and then apply those tools to help construct world-class silicon. You’ll work closely across architecture, design, verification, performance modeling, and systems software. This role is well suited for an engineer who enjoys building high quality software and is motivated by the challenge of improving velocity and quality of the silicon development process. In this role, you will: Develop and scale design methodologies for rapid first-party chip development and apply them to construct complex custom chips Create abstractions that allow hardware structures, configurations, experiments, and results to be represented consistently across tools. Automate high-value engineering workflows and improve their reproducibility, observability, testability, and ease of use. Partner with architects, RTL designers, verification engineers, compiler engineers, and systems software engineers to gather requirements and then implement solutions. Use methodology and tooling to identify design risks early, accelerate iteration, and improve confidence in performance and implementation tradeoffs. Contribute across multiple aspects of software and hardware
About the Team The Platform Systems team at OpenAI operates at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and large-scale distributed systems. We build the engineering and research infrastructure required to train OpenAI’s flagship models on some of the world’s largest, custom-built supercomputers. Our team develops core model training software and works deep in the stack - spanning collective communication, compute efficiency, parallelism strategies, fault tolerance, failure detection, and observability. The systems we build are foundational to OpenAI’s research velocity, enabling reliable, efficient training at frontier scale. We collaborate closely with researchers across the organization, continuously incorporating learnings from across OpenAI into the evolution of our training platform. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Platform Systems, you will design and build distributed systems that provide visibility into large-scale training workloads and help operate them reliably at scale. You’ll work on failure detection, tracing, and observability systems that identify slow or faulty nodes, surface performance bottlenecks, and help engineers understand and optimize massive distributed training jobs. This infrastructure is critical to operating OpenAI’s training stack and is actively evolving to support new use cases and increasingly complex workloads. This role sits at the core of our training infrastructure, blending systems engineering, performance analysis, and large-scale debugging. In This Role, You Will Design and build distributed failure detection, tracing, and profiling systems for large-scale AI training jobs Develop tooling to identify slow, faulty, or misbehaving nodes and provide actionable visibility into system behavior Improve observability, reliability, and performance across OpenAI’s training platform Debug and resolve issues in complex, high-throughput distributed systems Collaborate with systems, infrastructure, and research teams to evolve platform
About the Team GTM Growth Engineering builds AI-native products and systems that help OpenAI's go-to-market and B2B marketing organizations operate with greater speed, focus, and leverage. Our mandate is revenue leverage: products tied directly to pipeline quality, customer engagement, seller and marketer productivity, and the speed at which OpenAI can bring its technology to customers. We build the infrastructure and user experiences behind high-impact GTM workflows, including customer context, prioritization, routing, campaign execution, review surfaces, feedback loops, and measurement. Our work combines product craft, applied AI, reliable systems, and thoughtful operational design. About the Role We’re looking for a product-minded Software Engineer to build AI-powered products and full-stack experiences for GTM Growth Engineering. You will own meaningful product slices end to end, from user experience and frontend implementation to backend APIs, integrations, data models, instrumentation, and launch readiness. This is a role for engineers who want to build products that do real work in production. You will partner with Product, Design, Data Science, Sales, B2B Marketing, and operations teams to understand high-value workflows and ship systems that improve customer engagement, pipeline, conversion, and team productivity. The role is ideal for a strong product engineer who can move between product craft, systems engineering, applied AI, and measurable business outcomes. You should be excited to build from ambiguous problem statements, ship quickly, and improve products based on real user feedback. What You'll Do Build AI-powered products and workflows that help sales and B2B marketing teams identify opportunities, coordinate work, and engage customers more effectively. Own full-stack product experiences from prototype through launch, instrumentation, iteration, and production hardening. Design intuitive user journeys that combine polished interfaces, reliable servi
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