Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices

Role details

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