Staff PLM & Engineering Applications Engineer, Consumer Devices
About this role
Hardware engineers often struggle with fragile workflows, manual setup guides, and disconnected tools when building AI-driven physical devices. To solve this problem, OpenAI's new Hardware Engineering eXperience team needs a technical builder to establish the foundational environments and application platforms that power consumer device development. Operating as a primary counterpart to the HEX lead, this role focuses on transforming complex product-data systems, licensing, and engineering applications into reliable, automated workflows.
Working within a hands-on environment, the engineer will architect and deploy Teamcenter, NX, and associated product-data pipelines from scratch. Instead of managing standard IT support queues, the person in this position will replace tribal knowledge with tested installers, regression tests, and coherent systems integration. A background in hardware product development combined with deep expertise in PLM administration, custom tooling, and automation will position a candidate to thrive on this bootstrapped team.
What you will do
- 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 release processes.
- Replace manual setup documentation with automated installation, configuration, validation, diagnostics, and recovery workflows.
- Define and validate the golden path for hardware engineers across access, design, save, release, and simulation tasks.
- Partner with mechanical, electrical, simulation, manufacturing, and systems teams to identify and resolve broken workflows.
- Build health checks, regression tests, observability, diagnostics, and support tooling that make failures easy to detect and recover from.
- Establish technical standards, operating models, and engineering culture for the growing HEX organization.
What you need
- Bring deep hands-on experience with Teamcenter, NX, PLM systems, and CAD workflows in a hardware product-development environment.
- Possess demonstrated experience owning PLM architecture, data models, integrations, migrations, parts imports, and release workflows.
- Demonstrate the ability to write automation in Python, PowerShell, Bash, and similar tools.
- Understand parts, revisions, BOMs, configurations, lifecycle states, and change workflows.
- Demonstrate experience with packaging, deployment, licensing, validation, and application integrations.
- Show proficiency in debugging across applications, infrastructure, licenses, VDI, networking, storage, compute, and product data.
- Bring experience with Teamcenter Active Workspace, BMIDE, ITK, SOA/REST, and Teamcenter customization.
- Possess experience with NX Open, managed mode, customer defaults, templates, licensing, packaging, and upgrades.
Nice to have
- Experience with PLM migrations, legacy part imports, data cleanup, ERP integrations, and ECAD integrations
- Experience with MCAD, ECAD, CAE/FEA, HPC, VDI/AVD, GPU workstations, and engineering storage
- Experience building internal platforms, developer tooling, infrastructure automation, and self-service systems
- Experience in complex hardware-development environments, including consumer devices, robotics, automotive, aerospace, or embedded systems
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the compensation for this role?
The salary ranges from $257K to $285K and includes offers for equity.
Where is the position located?
The role is located in San Francisco.
What team will I be working on?
You will be working on the Hardware Engineering eXperience team, known as HEX, which is a new bootstrapped team within Consumer Devices.