OS Architect for Consumer Devices

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

Job summary

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

We are seeking an Operating Systems Engineer to harden the OS foundations for OpenAI products, emphasizing deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production.

Qualifications

• Strong experience with systems programming (Linux, BSD) including kernel work.
• Proficiency in C, C++ for low-level development.
• Experience building core OS services and platform software (system services, daemons, init/service management).
• Track record debugging complex issues across kernel/userspace using tracing and profiling.
• Familiarity with OS security fundamentals: isolation, privilege separation, secure IPC, vulnerability mitigation.

Responsibilities

• Work on end-to-end OS capabilities spanning the OS kernel, userspace services, application frameworks, UI toolkits, and application-facing APIs.
• Develop, integrate, and maintain OS components, both kernel-bound and in userspace, including scheduling, memory management, filesystems, drivers, IPC/RPC mechanisms, and security-relevant subsystems.
• Build and maintain core OS services and daemons (init, service management, device discovery, networking primitives, time, logging, update hooks, crash handling).
• Design and implement security and privacy mechanisms: Secure boot and measured boot integration points; Mandatory access control and sandboxing; Secrets management and least-privilege service design; Privacy-preserving telemetry and user-consent oriented behaviors.
• Establish a performance and power discipline: instrumentation, profiling, regression detection for boot time, latency, throughput, and memory; power measurement workflows, battery and thermal tuning; energy regression prevention.
• Build first-class debugging and observability: tracing and profiling using tools like ftrace, perf, eBPF, BPFtrace, LTTng, systemtap; crash triage and root cause analysis including postmortem tooling.
• Provide stable, well-documented interfaces for application/frameworks: Windowing/compositing primitives (Wayland), input pipelines, graphics stack integration (DRM/KMS), and system APIs for permissions, notifications, lifecycle management.
• Contribute to reliability and release readiness: production hardening, incident response, cross-team debugging; test strategies across unit/integration/hardware-in-the-loop.

Skills

C

C++

Kernel debugging

Linux/ BSD experience

Security fundamentals

Job description

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

We are seeking an Operating Systems Engineer to harden the OS foundations for OpenAI products, emphasizing deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production.