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Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

OpenAI· Consumer Devices
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San Francisco$230k - $342kFull-timePosted 8mo ago

About the role

OpenAI is hiring an Operating Systems Engineer to build and harden the OS foundations for OpenAI products, collaborating with embedded, firmware, hardware, application, and product teams to address security, privacy, performance, power, and reliability across kernel, services, and UI interfaces.

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, and so on).
  • Design and implement security and privacy mechanisms: 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 a performance and power discipline: Instrumentation, profiling, and regression detection for boot time, latency, throughput, and memory; Power measurement workflows, battery and thermal aware tuning, and energy regression prevention.
  • Build first-class debugging and observability for the OS: Tracing and profiling using tools such as ftrace, perf, eBPF, BPFtrace, LTTng, systemtap, flamegraphs; Crash triage and root cause analysis across kernel and userspace, including postmortem tooling and symbolication.
  • Provide stable, well-documented platform interfaces for application frameworks and UI frameworks: Windowing/compositing primitives (Wayland), input pipelines, graphics stack integration (DRM/KMS), and UI performance; System APIs for permissions, notifications, background execution, storage, device access, and lifecycle management.
  • Contribute to reliability and release readiness: Production hardening, incident response participation, cross-team debugging; Test strategy across unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop environments; improve coverage and reduce flakiness.

Qualifications

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

Skills

Required:Systems programmingCC++Kernel/OS servicesSecurity fundamentals in OS design

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits (e.g., charitable donation matching and wellness stipends)
Last updated Sep 24, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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Company profileWebsite

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