Operating Systems Engineer, On-Device Inference | Consumer Devices

Details

OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. The team works across silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the platforms required to support them.

As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference, you will design, develop, and ship the OS stack that makes advanced AI capabilities reliable, responsive, and energy efficient on consumer devices. Your work will span OS services and frameworks, inference runtime integration, model fitting, scheduling, and performance and power management. You will partner with research to adapt models to device constraints, make design decisions across the stack, and carry solutions from early exploration through integration and production.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management.
• Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior.
• Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device activity while preserving responsiveness within latency, memory, battery, and thermal constraints.
• Develop and validate execution strategies that adapt to workload needs, available resources, and changing device conditions.
• Use tracing, profiling, and structured debugging to investigate correctness, concurrency, performance, and reliability issues across models, inference runtimes, and OS components.
• Build diagnostic tools, instrumentation, representative device workloads, and automated tests to demonstrate repeatable performance and energy gains on physical devices, catch regressions, and validate sustained use.
• Collaborate with research, hardware, firmware, platform, and product engineering teams to turn emerging model capabilities into maintainable systems and reliable shipped features.

Requirements

• Substantial hands-on experience designing, developing, and debugging operating system components, system services, or performance-critical platform software.
• Proficiency in C++ for systems development, including concurrent programming, memory ownership, and resource lifetime management.
• Hands-on experience integrating or optimizing inference runtimes or machine learning workloads in resource-constrained environments.
• Strong understanding of scheduling, memory management, and how workloads compete for shared system resources.
• Experience diagnosing complex system behavior and delivering performance or power improvements supported by repeatable measurements.
• Ability to work across disciplines, translate research and product needs into system requirements, and explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly.
• Experience delivering end-to-end on-device inference in shipped products, from model adaptation and runtime integration through OS support and production debugging, is beneficial.
• Experience adapting models for deployment through quantization, compression, or related techniques is beneficial.
• Experience optimizing inference across CPUs, GPUs, or neural accelerators, including data movement, synchronization, and execution placement, is beneficial.
• Proficiency in Rust for systems programming is beneficial.
• Ability to take ownership of complete solutions, challenge assumptions, use experiments and measurements to guide decisions, and make tradeoffs among model quality, performance, power, reliability, security, and maintainability.

Benefits

• Base salary of $230,000–$385,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• 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.