About this role
Engineers who thrive in high-ownership environments and enjoy tackling complex, multi-layered challenges across hardware and software boundaries will find a natural fit within this group. OpenAI's Hardware organization builds AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power future frontier models, requiring dedicated infrastructure to support large-scale manufacturing and deployment.
Within the First-Party Hardware team, the incoming software engineer will design, build, integrate, and validate the systems used to manufacture, qualify, and deliver hardware from the factory. Working across the stack, the person in this role coordinates production processes, builds critical automation and telemetry tools, and collaborates closely with internal teams and external vendors to maintain high standards of quality and velocity.
What you will do
- Design, develop, and maintain the software infrastructure for manufacturing process execution and data export.
- Build and maintain internal systems to ingest, process, deliver, and visualize critical data for internal and external teams.
- Develop automation frameworks and monitoring for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, and long-term reliability.
- Package engineering releases into manufacturing-ready software recipes including images, versions, logs, and remediation mapping.
- Debug complex production issues spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, services, networking, power, thermals, and cloud services.
- Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to define software contracts, unblock bring-up, and drive issues to closure.
What you need
- Bring 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in system software, platform software, hardware diagnostics, and cloud infrastructure.
- Demonstrate strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages with experience building reliable software for real hardware.
- Possess familiarity with scripting in languages such as shell and python as used in automation systems.
- Show familiarity with Linux-based hardware platforms, OpenBMC, Redfish, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, and fleet management software.
- Prove the ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, and Linux tooling.
- Exhibit experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance compute platforms.
Nice to have
- Familiarity with platform security topics such as secure boot, firmware signing, device provisioning, attestation, certificate handling, trusted update flows, or access-control design
Benefits
- Offers Equity
- Relocation assistance available
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is the role located and what is the remote policy?
This role is located in San Francisco, CA on a hybrid schedule requiring 3 days per week onsite. Relocation assistance is available for qualifying candidates.
What is the compensation for this position?
The salary range for this position is $310K to $460K, and the compensation package also includes offers of equity.
What kind of systems and tech stack will I be working with?
You will work with systems languages like C, C++, and Rust, alongside Python and shell scripting for automation. The environment utilizes Linux-based hardware platforms, OpenBMC, Redfish, and various firmware update and fleet management systems.
Who will I be collaborating with in this position?
You will partner closely with hardware, firmware, security, networking, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and external engineering teams to define software contracts and drive issues to closure.