Operating Systems Engineer, On-Device Inference | Consumer Devices

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI Consumer Devices seeks an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference to design, develop, and ship the OS stack enabling reliable, responsive, and energy-efficient AI on consumer devices. You will collaborate across OS services, inference runtimes, and research to adapt models to device constraints and production-ready solutions.

The role involves shaping scheduling, memory management, and power strategies, with opportunities to bring capabilities to production through

Qualifications

• Substantial hands-on experience designing, developing, and debugging operating system components or performance-critical software.

Responsibilities

• Build the inference platform: design and implement OS services, frameworks, interfaces for inference execution and lifecycle.

Skills

OS development

C++

ML inference

Scheduling

Performance debugging

Rust

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people's everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI's mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You'll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products-and shape how people experience AI in the future.

Our team works across silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the novel platforms required to support them. We partner closely with research to bring advanced AI capabilities into the physical world.

About the Role

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'll 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.

In this role, you will:

• Build the inference platform: Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management.
• Fit models to device constraints: Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior.
• Coordinate system resources: Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device activity, preserving responsiveness within latency, memory, battery, and thermal constraints.
• Advance performance and power management: Develop and validate execution strategies that adapt to workload needs, available resources, and changing device conditions.
• Debug across the stack: Use tracing, profiling, and structured debugging to investigate correctness, concurrency, performance, and reliability issues across models, inference runtimes, and OS components.
• Measure and validate improvements: 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.
• Bring capabilities to production: Collaborate with research, hardware, firmware, platform, and product engineering teams to turn emerging model capabilities into maintainable systems and reliable shipped features.

Minimum Qualifications

• 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have delivered end-to-end on-device inference in shipped products, from model adaptation and runtime integration through OS support and production debugging.
• Have adapted models for deployment through quantization, compression, or related techniques, balancing quality, execution cost, and memory requirements.
• Have optimized inference across CPUs, GPUs, or neural accelerators, accounting for data movement, synchronization, and execution placement.
• Are proficient in Rust for systems programming.

• Take ownership of complete solutions and follow problems across model, runtime, and operating system boundaries.
• Challenge assumptions, develop new approaches when existing techniques fall short, and use experiments and measurements to guide decisions.
• Work constructively across disciplines and make careful tradeoffs among model quality, performance, power, reliability, security, and maintainability.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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