Base Salary
$380k - $445k/yr
Responsibilities
- Bring up new hardware rapidly and set the execution pace for the firmware team.
- Lead embedded firmware architecture across boot, RTOS/runtime behavior, peripheral control, power management, communications, and field diagnostics.
- Define standards for reliability, fault tolerance, observability, maintainability, and production readiness.
- Design and review safety-critical fault detection, recovery, watchdog, redundancy, and safe-state mechanisms.
- Build rapid prototypes and harden validated ideas into production-quality firmware.
- Partner with hardware, software, and AI research engineers from prototype through production.
- Establish bring-up, validation, testing, and release processes for embedded platforms.
- Develop testing strategies covering unit, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, stress, and failure-injection testing.
- Drive root-cause analysis for complex hardware, firmware, and system interactions.
- Make tradeoffs across performance, memory, power, schedule, and safety.
- Mentor firmware engineers and provide technical direction.
Requirements
- Extensive experience developing firmware in an iterative environment.
- Experience leading architecture and delivery for complex embedded products shipped to real users or operated in demanding production environments.
- Deep fluency in low-level languages, with Rust used extensively in the embedded stack.
- Strong understanding of interrupts, scheduling, memory layout, buses, DMA, timing behavior, real-time constraints, and embedded failure modes.
- Experience with defensive design, fault containment, validation depth, and post-deployment diagnosability.
- Ability to balance durable architecture with rapid, credible prototyping.
- Clear cross-disciplinary communication and ability to turn ambiguity into technical direction.
- Nice to have: Rust experience in embedded environments.
- Nice to have: Embassy or other asynchronous embedded Rust framework experience.
- Nice to have: mixed-language firmware architecture experience, including introducing Rust into existing C/C++ systems.
- Nice to have: ARM Cortex-M or Cortex-R, RTOS, and low-power embedded design experience.
- Nice to have: firmware experience for sensor-rich, latency-sensitive, or tightly integrated electromechanical products.
- Experience using Codex, Claude Code, or similar AI-assisted coding systems is valued.
Benefits
- Based in San Francisco, California.
- Expected to work in the office four days per week.
- Relocation assistance is offered to new employees.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core. OpenAI is dedicated to putting that alignment of interests first — ahead of profit. To achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. Our investment in diversity, equity, and inclusion is ongoing, executed through a wide range of initiatives, and championed and supported by leadership. 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.