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OpenAI

Control Systems Software Engineer, Robotics

OpenAI
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onsite senior Full time $380K – $460K San Francisco

First indexed 9 Sept 2026

Description

Compensation

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The salary range for this role is $380K – $460K, with generous equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

Benefits include:

  • 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

About the Team

Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. We integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors.

About the Role

We're looking for a Robotics Control Systems Engineer to take on a foundational role within our robotics team. You'll help architect, implement, tune, and verify the control infrastructure that enables intelligent, reliable, and responsive robot behavior.

Responsibilities include:

  • Designing and implementing real-time control algorithms for robotic systems
  • Defining the control architecture from low-level actuators and hardware interfaces through whole-robot behavior and policy
  • Identifying and characterizing actuator, hardware, and software parameters through rigorous experimentation, testing, commissioning, and verification
  • Working with machine learning engineers to implement reinforcement learning models
  • Collaborating across mechanical, electrical, and software teams to integrate control logic with sensing and actuation hardware
  • Informing the mechanical and electrical design to maximize capability and flexibility
  • Creating the control system architecture; determining the correct level of abstraction from actuators all the way up to whole-robot policy

Requirements

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have a strong robotics background, including manipulators, mobile robots, or other complex physical systems
  • Have experience with actuation, control systems, robot dynamics, estimation, subsystem tuning, or whole-body motion
  • Are comfortable being hands-on with robotic hardware, including commissioning, debugging, testing, and iterating on real robots
  • Have strong fundamentals in classical control, system dynamics, and estimation, with exposure to modern learning-based or reinforcement learning approaches
  • Can move comfortably across the stack, from low-level actuator behavior and hardware interfaces to higher-level algorithms and whole-robot performance
  • Have experience writing performant production-quality software in C++ or Rust
  • Experience with robotic hardware and enjoy iterating quickly between simulation and real-world testing environments
This listing is enriched and indexed by YubHub. To apply, use the employer's original posting: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/60573bf4-13ad-4933-aba7-729f428e9f69