Base Salary
$230k - $342k/yr
Responsibilities
- Develop OS capabilities spanning the kernel, userspace services, application frameworks, UI toolkits, and application-facing APIs.
- Build and maintain kernel and userspace components including scheduling, memory management, filesystems, drivers, IPC/RPC mechanisms, and security-relevant subsystems.
- Develop core OS services and daemons for initialization, service management, device discovery, networking primitives, time, logging, updates, and crash handling.
- Design secure boot, access-control, sandboxing, secrets-management, secure-storage, key-handling, least-privilege, and privacy-preserving system mechanisms.
- Measure and optimize boot time, latency, throughput, memory, battery usage, and thermal behavior while preventing regressions.
- Build OS debugging and observability through tracing, profiling, crash triage, root-cause analysis, postmortem tooling, and symbolication.
- Provide stable platform interfaces for windowing, compositing, input, graphics, permissions, notifications, background execution, storage, device access, and lifecycle management.
- Support production hardening, incident response, release readiness, cross-team debugging, and testing across unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop environments.
Requirements
- Strong systems-programming experience with Linux, BSD, or comparable operating systems, including meaningful kernel work on drivers, core subsystems, or platform enablement.
- Professional proficiency in C and C++ for low-level systems development.
- Experience building or maintaining core OS services and platform software such as system services, daemons, initialization, service management, device management, and logging or telemetry pipelines.
- Demonstrated ability to debug complex kernel/userspace issues using tracing, profiling, and structured root-cause analysis.
- Familiarity with OS security fundamentals including isolation boundaries, privilege separation, secure IPC, attack-surface reduction, and vulnerability mitigation.
- Production systems experience with Rust is strongly preferred.
- Experience with SELinux or AppArmor, sandboxing, seccomp, namespaces or cgroups, secure boot chains, exploit mitigations, eBPF observability, performance and power optimization, or application and UI frameworks is preferred.
- Hardware bring-up, OTA/update systems, Linux kernel or systems open-source contributions, and long-lived downstream patch management are nice to have.
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.