Software Engineer, Manufacturing Infrastructure

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 Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will design, build, integrate, and validate the software used to manufacture, qualify, and deliver our hardware from the factory.

You will work across the stack to create the infrastructure that runs internally and externally to coordinate all aspects of the production process. You will create the critical tools and procedures to execute, capture, process, and present the data resulting from the end to end assembly and validation of our hardware across multiple vendors and sites.

This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will work closely across teams both internal and external to define the standards that will be used across our products to ensure the velocity and quality of our 1P hardware. You will own the implementation, deployment, and output of these systems as well their continued maintenance and SLAs.

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite). Relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will:

• Design, develop, and maintain the software infrastructure for manufacturing process execution and data export.

• Own integration across internal customers and vendor systems and processes.

• Build and maintain the CI, release, and delivery pipeline of tooling to external partners.

• Build and maintain internal systems to ingest, process, deliver, and visualize critical data for internal teams and systems.

• Build system health monitoring, telemetry, remote diagnostics, and recovery paths that make manufacturing failures traceable and actionable.

• Develop automation frameworks and monitoring for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, and long-term reliability.

• Package engineering releases into manufacturing-ready software recipes: images, versions, logs, limits, remediation mapping, provisioning hooks, secure artifact handling, and traceable data export.

• Debug complex production issues spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, services, networking, power, thermals, boot, provisioning, manufacturing, test, and cloud services.

• Partner with hardware, firmware, security, networking, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and external engineering teams to define software contracts, unblock bring-up, and drive issues to closure.

• Produce durable architecture notes, runbooks, validation records, and decision documents that help OpenAI and partner teams reproduce, operate, and improve the platform.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in system software, platform software, hardware diagnostics, and cloud infrastructure.

• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.

• Familiarity with scripting in languages such as shell and python as used in automation systems.

• Familiarity with Linux-based hardware platforms, OpenBMC, Redfish, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, and fleet management software.

• Demonstrated ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, Linux tooling, and carefully controlled experiments.

• Experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance compute, accelerator, server, networking, storage, or embedded platforms.

• Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries, and to turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, designs, tests, and decisions.

• Proven track record working with external vendors, manufacturing partners, or partner engineering teams to define deliverables, review technical work, and drive issues to closure.

• Familiarity with platform security topics such as secure boot, firmware signing, device provisioning, attestation, certificate handling, trusted update flows, or access-control design is a plus.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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 our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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