Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

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 practices.

Strongly 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).

Nice To Have

• 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.

What Success Looks Like

• The OS is secure by default, privacy-preserving, and designed for least privilege.
• Performance and power characteristics are measurable, repeatable, and continuously improved with low regression rates.
• Debugging is fast: tracing, logs, crash artifacts, and metrics make issues diagnosable in development and in the field.
• Application and UI teams have stable, well-documented system interfaces that enable high-quality product experiences.

Working Style

• You take ownership across boundaries: kernel, services, tooling, and the interfaces that applications rely on.
• You are comfortable making careful tradeoffs between security, privacy, performance, power, and developer velocity.
• You communicate clearly with partner teams and can translate low-level findings into actionable changes.

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 the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.