OpenAI · 20 hours ago
Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices
San Francisco
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$230K/yr - $385K/yrOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They are seeking an Operating Systems Engineer to build and harden the OS foundations for their products, focusing on security, privacy, performance, and reliability across various OS components. The role involves collaboration with multiple engineering teams and emphasizes deep debugging and systems ownership from development through production.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)SaaSAgentic AIFoundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language Processing
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
Privacy-preserving telemetry, data minimization, and user-consent oriented system behaviors
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
Qualification
Required
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 practices
Preferred
Production experience with Rust in systems contexts (kernel-adjacent tooling, userspace services, security-sensitive components, or performance-critical libraries)
Experience with OS security hardening: SELinux/AppArmor policy, sandboxing, seccomp, namespaces/cgroups, secure boot chains, exploit mitigations
Experience setting up and operationalizing observability: eBPF-based tooling, perf pipelines, automated regression detection
Performance and power optimization experience, including measurement methodology (power rails, battery instrumentation, thermal constraints) and closed-loop tuning
Experience supporting application or UI frameworks at the OS boundary (Wayland/compositors, graphics pipeline performance, input latency, lifecycle/permission models)
Hardware bring-up exposure (bootloader/early boot debugging, device tree/ACPI, board revisions, peripheral enablement), even if not your primary background
Experience with OTA/update systems, partitioning strategies, rollback/health checks, and update security (signing, provenance)
Experience contributing to upstream open source projects (Linux kernel, system components) and managing long-lived downstream patches responsibly
Company
OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
Founded in 2015
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$79BKey Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B
Leadership Team
Fidji Simo
CEO, Applications
Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-02-12
PCMag.com - Technology Product Reviews, News, Prices & Tips
2026-02-12
Company data provided by crunchbase