# Camera Firmware Engineer, Consumer Products

**Company**: OpenAI
**Location**: San Francisco
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $293K – $325K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124605186

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/1dc05fc7-ceb7-4827-a905-9d1beb77a4a0
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_f2962d61-5b2

## Description

## Camera Firmware Engineer, Consumer Products

### About the Role

As a Camera Firmware Engineer, you will own low-level camera enablement on custom hardware—from early board bring-up through stable production capture. You will develop and maintain the firmware and software that makes camera sensors reliable, controllable, and debuggable, forming the foundation for higher-level camera pipelines and product features.

### In This Role, You Will

- Bring up new camera sensors and modules on prototype and production boards, including link stability, sensor control, and correct power, reset, and clock sequencing.

- Develop and maintain low-level camera software, including sensor drivers, board configuration, and camera subsystem integration across hardware revisions.

- Enable and validate core capture paths for development and production, including RAW capture for debugging, still capture, and hardware-accelerated video encode and streaming with stable timestamps and long-duration reliability.

- Stand up camera control and repeatability features, including basic 3A loop exposure, manual overrides and locks, and deterministic presets to support validation and debugging.

- Build and maintain camera bring-up tooling, such as capture scripts, automated sweeps, manifests, and debugging utilities that make issues reproducible and easy to triage.

- Partner closely with electrical engineering, camera pipeline owners, and systems teams to define interfaces, unblock integration, and keep the camera stack stable as the device evolves.

### **You might thrive in this role if you:**

- Deep experience shipping embedded camera systems, including sensor bring-up, driver development, and board-level debugging.

- Strong C/C++ experience with embedded or Linux-based systems; comfortable debugging across kernel and userspace boundaries.

- Hands-on understanding of common camera hardware interfaces (for example, MIPI CSI and sensor control buses) and the practical realities of bring-up, including power, reset, clocking, and sequencing.

### Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with common mobile or embedded SoC camera stacks and vendor frameworks.

- Experience integrating and debugging hardware acceleration blocks adjacent to camera pipelines, such as video encode and decode paths.

- Familiarity building higher-level capture pipelines (for example, GStreamer) on top of low-level camera enablement.

### 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 artificial intelligence research and deployment.

## Skills

### Required
- C/C++
- Embedded systems
- Linux-based systems
- Camera hardware interfaces
- Sensor control buses
- Power, reset, clocking, and sequencing

### Nice to have
- Common mobile or embedded SoC camera stacks
- Vendor frameworks
- Hardware acceleration blocks
- Higher-level capture pipelines