Operating Systems Engineer

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 performance and power discipline:

  • Instrumentation, profiling, and regression detection for boot time, latency, throughput, and memory.

  • Power measurement workflows, battery and thermal aware tuning, and energy regression prevention.

• Build first-class debugging and observability for the OS:

  • Tracing and profiling using tools such as ftrace, perf, eBPF, BPFtrace, LTTng, systemtap, flamegraphs.

    • Crash triage and root cause analysis across kernel and userspace, including postmortem tooling and symbolication.

• Provide stable, well-documented platform interfaces for application frameworks and UI frameworks:

  • Windowing/compositing primitives (e.g., Wayland), input pipelines, graphics stack integration (e.g., DRM/KMS), and UI performance.

  • System APIs for permissions, notifications, background execution, storage, device access, and lifecycle management.

• Contribute to reliability and release readiness:

  • Production hardening, incident response participation, and cross-team debugging.

  • Test strategy across unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop environments; improve coverage and reduce flakiness.
    

Required qualifications

• Strong experience with systems programming (such as with Linux, BSD, etc), including meaningful work in the kernel (drivers, core subsystems, or platform enablement) and operating systems.
  

• Professional proficiency in C, C++ for low-level systems development.
  

• Experience building or maintaining core OS services and platform software (system services, daemons, init/service management, device management, logging/telemetry pipelines).
  

• Track record of debugging complex issues across kernel/userspace boundaries using tracing, profiling, and structured root cause analysis.
  

• Familiarity with security fundamentals in OS design: isolation boundaries, privilege separation, secure IPC, attack surface reduction, and vulnerability mitigation practices.
  

Strongly preferred

• Production experience with Rust in systems contexts (kernel-adjacent tooling, userspace services, security-sensitive components, or performance-critical libraries).
  

• Experience with OS security hardening: SELinux/AppArmor policy, sandboxing, seccomp, namespaces/cgroups, secure boot chains, exploit mitigations.
  

• Experience setting up and operationalizing observability: eBPF-based tooling, perf pipelines, automated regression detection.
  

• Performance and power optimization experience, including measurement methodology (power rails, battery instrumentation, thermal constraints) and closed-loop tuning.
  

• Experience supporting application or UI frameworks at the OS boundary (Wayland/compositors, graphics pipeline performance, input latency, lifecycle/permission models).
  

Nice to have

• Hardware bring-up exposure (bootloader/early boot debugging, device tree/ACPI, board revisions, peripheral enablement), even if not your primary background.
  

• Experience with OTA/update systems, partitioning strategies, rollback/health checks, and update security (signing, provenance).
  

• Experience contributing to upstream open source projects (Linux kernel, system components) and managing long-lived downstream patches responsibly.
  

What success looks like

• The OS is secure by default, privacy-preserving, and designed for least privilege.
  

• Performance and power characteristics are measurable, repeatable, and continuously improved with low regression rates.
  

• Debugging is fast: tracing, logs, crash artifacts, and metrics make issues diagnosable in development and in the field.
  

• Application and UI teams have stable, well-documented system interfaces that enable high-quality product experiences.
  

Working style

• You take ownership across boundaries: kernel, services, tooling, and the interfaces that applications rely on.
  

• You are comfortable making careful tradeoffs between security, privacy, performance, power, and developer velocity.
  

• You communicate clearly with partner teams and can translate low-level findings into actionable changes.

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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