Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

About the Team

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

About the role

We are looking for an Operating Systems Engineer to build and harden the OS foundations for OpenAI products. We are especially interested in experienced, passionate, and innovative operating systems developers who thrive on building foundational platform software and solving hard problems in security, privacy, performance, power, and reliability. You will work across the OS kernel, core OS services, security and privacy primitives, performance and power, and the frameworks that connect applications and UI to the system. This role emphasizes deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production.

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 (where applicable).

• Mandatory access control and sandboxing.

• Secrets management, secure storage, key handling, and least-privilege service design.

• 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 (e.g., Wayland), input pipelines, graphics stack integration (e.g., 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, and cross-team debugging.

• Test strategy across unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop environments; improve coverage and reduce flakiness.

Required qualifications

• Strong experience with systems programming (such as with 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.

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.

What we offer

• Competitive salary and equity package.

• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI technology.

• Collaborative and dynamic work environment.

• Access to state-of-the-art hardware and software tools.

• Professional development opportunities.

• Flexible work arrangements.

• Comprehensive benefits package.

How to apply

If you are a motivated and talented individual who is passionate about building AI-powered products, please submit your application, including your resume and a cover letter, to [insert contact information]. We look forward to hearing from you!