Systems Software Engineer, BMC & Management Plane

Hardware - San Francisco

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño.

About the Role

We're seeking a Systems Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team, with a focus on BMC software and embedded Linux services for server and accelerator manageability. You will personally design, build, integrate, and validate software that monitors hardware health, exposes inventory and telemetry, controls power, and manages firmware updates and recovery across OpenAI’s first-party AI hardware systems.

You will work across BMC drivers, network software interfaces, and manufacturing and fleet readiness. A major part of this role is owning the acceptance path for partner-delivered system software: defining requirements, reviewing code and artifacts, reproducing builds, building tests, pushing fixes, and producing the evidence needed for launch decisions.

This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will write and review low-level softwares from bring-up through production deployment.

Location

San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite)

Relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will:

• Design drivers, and hardware diagnostics.
• 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.
• 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 infrastructure for testing and managing systems in our lab.
• Define and debug hardware management protocols across accelerators services, including interfaces such as I2C, SMBus, PMBus, PCIe, Ethernet, GPIO, UART, and JTAG.
• 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 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.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.
• Hands-on embedded Linux development experience, including personally implementing and debugging user-space services or daemons that interact with hardware and firmware. Relevant supporting experience includes Redfish, BMCWeb, IPMI, BIOS/UEFI, bootloaders, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, RTOS, or fleet management software.
• Experience developing BMC or OpenBMC or comparable hardware-management software for serverss is preferred. Prior BMC experience is not required for candidates with strong programming skills and hands-on embedded Linux development experience. Production data-center manageability experience is strongly preferred.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience software, device drivers, or hardware diagnostics.
• 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-ups.
• 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.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$266K – $445K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following 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 (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• 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.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.