Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

Details

The Consumer Devices team builds end-to-end hardware and software systems that bring AI into the physical world, working across custom silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to deliver reliable production-ready devices at scale.

The role focuses on building and hardening OS foundations for OpenAI products. The engineer will work across the OS kernel, core OS services, security and privacy primitives, performance and power, and the frameworks connecting applications and UI to the system. The position emphasizes deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production, with collaboration across embedded, firmware, hardware, application, and product engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop end-to-end OS capabilities spanning the kernel, userspace services, application frameworks, UI toolkits, and application-facing APIs.
• Develop, integrate, and maintain kernel and userspace components, including scheduling, memory management, filesystems, drivers, IPC/RPC mechanisms, and security-relevant subsystems.
• Build and maintain core OS services and daemons, including init, service management, device discovery, networking primitives, time, logging, update hooks, and crash handling.
• Design and implement security and privacy mechanisms, including:
  • Secure boot and measured boot integration points.
  • 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 performance and power practices through instrumentation, profiling, regression detection, power measurement, battery and thermal-aware tuning, and energy regression prevention.
• Build debugging and observability capabilities using tools such as ftrace, perf, eBPF, BPFtrace, LTTng, systemtap, and flamegraphs.
• Perform crash triage and root-cause analysis across kernel and userspace, including postmortem tooling and symbolication.
• Provide stable, documented platform interfaces for application and UI frameworks, including Wayland or similar windowing and compositing primitives, input pipelines, DRM/KMS graphics integration, UI performance, permissions, notifications, background execution, storage, device access, and lifecycle management.
• Contribute to production hardening, incident response, cross-team debugging, unit and integration testing, and hardware-in-the-loop test strategy.
• Improve test coverage and reduce flakiness.

Requirements

• Strong systems programming experience with Linux, BSD, or similar operating systems, including meaningful kernel work involving drivers, core subsystems, or platform enablement.
• Professional proficiency in C and C++ for low-level systems development.
• Experience building or maintaining core OS services and platform software, including system services, daemons, init or service management, device management, and logging or telemetry pipelines.
• Experience debugging complex issues across kernel and userspace boundaries using tracing, profiling, and structured root-cause analysis.
• Familiarity with OS security fundamentals, including isolation boundaries, privilege separation, secure IPC, attack-surface reduction, and vulnerability mitigation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with Rust in systems contexts, such as kernel-adjacent tooling, userspace services, security-sensitive components, or performance-critical libraries.
• Experience with SELinux or AppArmor policy, sandboxing, seccomp, namespaces/cgroups, secure boot chains, and exploit mitigations.
• Experience operationalizing observability with eBPF-based tooling, perf pipelines, and automated regression detection.
• Performance and power optimization experience, including power-rail measurement, battery instrumentation, thermal constraints, and closed-loop tuning.
• Experience supporting application or UI frameworks at the OS boundary, including Wayland/compositors, graphics pipeline performance, input latency, and lifecycle or permission models.
• Hardware bring-up exposure, including bootloader or early-boot debugging, device tree/ACPI, board revisions, and peripheral enablement.
• Experience with OTA/update systems, partitioning strategies, rollback and health checks, and update security such as signing and provenance.
• Experience contributing to upstream open-source projects such as the Linux kernel and system components, and managing long-lived downstream patches.

Success Criteria

• 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.
• Tracing, logs, crash artifacts, and metrics make issues diagnosable during development and in the field.
• Application and UI teams have stable, well-documented system interfaces.

Working Style

• Take ownership across the kernel, services, tooling, and application-facing interfaces.
• Make careful trade-offs between security, privacy, performance, power, and developer velocity.
• Communicate clearly with partner teams and 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. The company is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.