Software Engineer, Manufacturing Infrastructure

Details

OpenAI's Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for advanced AI workloads. The First-Party Hardware team is seeking a Software Engineer to design, build, integrate, and validate software used to manufacture, qualify, and deliver hardware from the factory.

The role involves creating infrastructure that coordinates production processes across internal teams, external vendors, and multiple sites. This includes tools and procedures to execute, capture, process, and present data from the end-to-end assembly and validation of hardware. The position is hands-on and high-ownership, with responsibility for implementation, deployment, system output, ongoing maintenance, and service-level agreements.

The role is based in San Francisco, California, with a hybrid schedule requiring three days per week onsite.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain software infrastructure for manufacturing process execution and data export.
• Own integration across internal customers, vendor systems, and production processes.
• Build and maintain CI, release, and delivery pipelines for tooling provided to external partners.
• Build and maintain internal systems to ingest, process, deliver, and visualize critical data.
• Develop system health monitoring, telemetry, remote diagnostics, and recovery paths that make manufacturing failures traceable and actionable.
• Develop automation frameworks and monitoring for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, and long-term reliability.
• Package engineering releases into manufacturing-ready software recipes, including images, versions, logs, limits, remediation mapping, provisioning hooks, secure artifact handling, and traceable data export.
• Debug complex production issues spanning hardware, firmware, kernels, services, networking, power, thermals, boot, provisioning, manufacturing, testing, and cloud services.
• Partner with hardware, firmware, security, networking, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and external engineering teams to define software contracts, unblock bring-up, and drive issues to closure.
• Produce architecture notes, runbooks, validation records, and decision documents to help internal and partner teams reproduce, operate, and improve the platform.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in system software, platform software, hardware diagnostics, and cloud infrastructure.
• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust, or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.
• Familiarity with shell scripting and Python in automation systems.
• Familiarity with Linux-based hardware platforms, OpenBMC, Redfish, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, and fleet management software.
• Demonstrated ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, Linux tooling, and controlled experiments.
• Experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance computing, accelerator, server, networking, storage, or embedded platforms.
• Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries and turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, designs, tests, and decisions.
• Proven experience working with external vendors, manufacturing partners, or partner engineering teams to define deliverables, review technical work, and drive issues to closure.
• Familiarity with platform security topics such as secure boot, firmware signing, device provisioning, attestation, certificate handling, trusted update flows, or access-control design is a plus.
• Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.

Benefits

• Base salary range of $310,000–$460,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, as well as commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and 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.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.