Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices OpenAI San Francisco

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.

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.

You will collaborate closely with embedded, firmware, hardware, application, and product engineering teams. Experience with hardware bring-up is a plus, but not required.

• 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, file systems, 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, flame graphs.

  • Crash triage and root cause analysis across kernel and userspace, including postmortem tooling and symbolication.

• 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.

• 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/App Armor policy, sandboxing, seccomp, name spaces/cgroups, secure boot chains, exploit mitigations.

• Expe…