Software Engineer, Manufacturing Infrastructure

📋 Job Overview

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 OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory that aims to develop and direct artificial intelligence in ways that benefit humanity as a whole. The company is known for its cutting-edge research and development in AI technologies.

🎯 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.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• 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.

📌 Required Qualifications

• 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.

⭐ Desirable Experience

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

🎁 Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.