Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

OpenAI, San Francisco

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.

All jobs

Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

OpenAI, San Francisco

Posted pay

$230K–$342K

a year

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for infrastructure, platform and SRE jobs in the Bay Area with no level in the job title.

Median: $215K a year
Other jobs in the group: 645

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.

Location: San Francisco
Work type: Not given
Level: Not given
Skills in the job text: C++
C
Linux
Posted: Aug 26, 2026
Last check: 2 h ago
Job type: Infra, platform & SRE

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OpenAI

Open tech jobs: 424
With posted pay: 90%
Median posted base: $266K–$414K

About OpenAI: funding, hiring and pay

OpenAI

About OpenAI: funding, hiring and pay

Company facts

Money raised: $51.3BSum of funding rounds on record
Newest round: Funding roundMar 31, 2025

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

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The role

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.

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.

Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

The role

Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

The role

The team

What you will do

What you will do

What success looks like

What you need

Nice to have

Strongly preferred

Working style

About OpenAI

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Company facts

OpenAI

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