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OpenAI's Consumer Devices team is building end-to-end hardware and software systems that bring AI into the physical world. This Operating Systems Engineer role focuses on building and hardening OS foundations for OpenAI consumer products, working at the intersection of custom silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services.
You will own OS capabilities spanning the kernel, userspace services, application frameworks, UI toolkits, and application-facing APIs. Key responsibilities include developing and maintaining OS components (scheduling, memory management, filesystems, drivers, IPC/RPC mechanisms, security subsystems), building core OS services and daemons (init, service management, device discovery, networking, logging, update hooks, crash handling), and designing security and privacy mechanisms including secure boot, mandatory access control, sandboxing, secrets management, and privacy-preserving telemetry.
You will establish performance and power discipline through instrumentation, profiling, regression detection, power measurement workflows, and battery/thermal-aware tuning. The role emphasizes building first-class debugging and observability using tools like ftrace, perf, eBPF, and flamegraphs, with responsibility for crash triage and root cause analysis. You will provide stable, well-documented platform interfaces for application and UI frameworks, including windowing/compositing primitives, input pipelines, and graphics stack integration.
Required qualifications include strong systems programming experience (Linux, BSD, kernel work), professional proficiency in C/C++ for low-level development, experience building core OS services and platform software, proven debugging skills across kernel/userspace boundaries, and familiarity with OS security fundamentals. Strongly preferred: production Rust experience in systems contexts, OS security hardening (SELinux/AppArmor, sandboxing, seccomp), observability setup (eBPF, perf pipelines), performance/power optimization, and application/UI framework support at the OS boundary. Nice-to-have: hardware bring-up exposure, OTA/update systems experience, and upstream open source contributions.
