Networking Operating System Firmware Engineer

Details

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for advanced AI workloads. The team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

The Networking Operating System Firmware Engineer will help bootstrap and scale the switching layer of AI supercomputers. The role involves building and maintaining custom NOS images from scratch using open-source components from SONiC, SAI, FRR, and related networking stacks, while working across the Linux kernel, switch ASIC SAI/SDKs, platform drivers, control-plane services, and orchestration layers.

This is a software engineering role requiring a deep understanding of networking, NOS internals, switch hardware, and production systems. The engineer will design, implement, test, and debug production NOS software across platform drivers, routing and control-plane state, ASIC programming, observability, and fleet integration. The role is based in San Francisco, California, and follows a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain custom NOS images for large-scale AI fabrics using SONiC, FRR, and related networking stacks.
• Integrate, build, and configure Linux kernel components, device drivers, switch ASIC SDKs, and SAI layers.
• Bring up new switch platforms, including thermal and fan control, power monitoring, transceiver management, watchdogs, OSFP CMIS, LEDs, CPLDs, and board-specific platform logic.
• Extend and customize NOS services for routing, telemetry, control-plane state, and distributed automation.
• Implement and debug route, neighbor, next-hop, and ECMP programming flows from control-plane intent through ASIC hardware state.
• Build mechanisms that distinguish control-plane acceptance, SAI/SDK acceptance, and explicit hardware programming acknowledgement.
• Work with hardware teams to validate ASIC configurations, link bring-up, SerDes tuning, buffer profiles, and performance baselines.
• Evaluate switch silicon SDK releases, track vendor deliverables, and validate platform requirements with vendors and ASIC partners.
• Debug issues spanning kernel drivers, platform monitoring, NOS services, routing agents, orchestration services, hardware signals, ASIC state, and network topology.
• Integrate switches into fleet-wide monitoring, remote diagnostics, telemetry pipelines, and automated lifecycle workflows.
• Develop robust CI and build pipelines for reproducible NOS builds and controlled fleet rollouts.
• Support factory bring-up and qualification through mass deployment.
• Collaborate on networking protocols and technologies that improve performance and reliability at AI factory scale.

Requirements

• Proven experience with SONiC or comparable NOS stacks such as FBOSS, Cumulus Linux, Arista EOS, Junos PFE-level integration, or equivalent platform software.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including clear interfaces, data models, state-machine design, error handling, testing, observability, performance debugging, and maintainable code.
• Experience programming in C, C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience with Linux kernel internals, network device drivers, platform drivers, hwmon, I2C/SMBus, CPLDs, or board-level platform software.
• Experience integrating or debugging Broadcom, Marvell, NVIDIA, Intel, or comparable switch ASIC SDKs and SAI implementations.
• Understanding of L2/L3 forwarding, ECMP, RoCE, BGP, QoS, PFC, buffer tuning, and telemetry.
• Experience with platform bring-up and board-level debugging across thermal, fan, power, transceiver, LED, watchdog, CPLD, or OSFP CMIS flows.
• Experience with OpenConfig gNMI interfaces, YANG data models, or structured telemetry is helpful.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, distributed configuration and state management, reproducible builds, and large-scale automation.
• Ability to independently drive ambiguous NOS or platform feature development from problem definition through implementation, validation, rollout, and debugging across software, hardware, and vendor boundaries.
• Familiarity with Rust or Go is a plus.
• Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.

Benefits

• Base salary of $266,000–$445,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax FSA and commuter accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.