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Systems Software Engineer, Management Plane

OpenAI· Scaling
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$266k - $445kFull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

Design, build, integrate, and validate low-level system software for the manageability and health of OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems, with ownership of partner-delivered software releases and end-to-end validation across BMC, Linux, firmware, and hardware diagnostics.

Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, and maintain low-level firmware and system software for first-party AI hardware manageability, including BMC software, Redfish services, gNMI telemetry, firmware update and recovery flows, BIOS/UEFI interactions, platform drivers, and hardware diagnostics.
  • Own integration and acceptance of partner and vendor software releases, including requirements, code and artifact review, reproducible builds, CI, regression monitoring, version tracking, acceptance criteria, and launch-readiness evidence.
  • Build and maintain automation and CI infra for testing and managing systems in our lab
  • Define and debug hardware management protocols across accelerators, host systems, management controllers, firmware, and platform services, including interfaces such as I2C, SMBus, PMBus, PCIe, Ethernet, GPIO, UART, and JTAG.
  • Build system health monitoring, telemetry, remote diagnostics, and recovery paths that make hardware failures diagnosable in the lab, at manufacturing partners, and in production data centers.
  • Develop validation and test automation for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, and long-term reliability.
  • Convert engineering releases into manufacturing-ready software recipes: images, versions, logs, limits, remediation mapping, provisioning hooks, secure artifact handling, and traceable data export.
  • Debug complex production issues spanning hardware signals, BMC firmware, BIOS/UEFI, kernel drivers, platform services, network topology, PCIe behavior, power, thermals, boot, provisioning, and manufacturing test.
  • 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 durable architecture notes, runbooks, validation records, and decision documents that help OpenAI and partner teams reproduce, operate, and improve the platform.

Qualifications

  • 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in low-level system software, embedded software, firmware, BMC software, platform software, device drivers, or hardware diagnostics.
  • Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.
  • Experience with Linux-based hardware platforms, embedded Linux, OpenBMC, Redfish, BMCWeb, IPMI boundaries, BIOS/UEFI, bootloaders, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, RTOS, or fleet management software.
  • Strong knowledge of hardware/software interfaces such as I2C, SMBus, PMBus, SPI, PCIe, Ethernet, USB, UART, GPIO, JTAG, power controllers, board-level debug tools, or protocol analyzers.
  • Demonstrated ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, Linux tooling, and carefully controlled experiments.
  • Experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance compute, accelerator, server, networking, storage, or embedded platforms.
  • Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries, and to turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, designs, tests, and decisions.
  • Proven track record 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.

Skills

Required:Low-level system software development (firmware, BMC, platform software)C, C++, Rust or similar systems languagesLinux-based hardware platforms / OpenBMC / RedfishHardware interfaces (I2C, SMBus, PMBus, PCIe, Ethernet, GPIO, JTAG, etc.)

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 to fuel your professional growth
  • Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
Last updated Jul 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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