Manufacturing Engineer Jobs in San Francisco, CA

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño.

About the Role

We're seeking a Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will design, build, integrate, and validate the software used to manufacture, qualify, and deliver our hardware from the factory.

You will work across the stack to create the infrastructure that runs internally and externally to coordinate all aspects of the production process. You will create the critical tools and procedures to execute, capture, process, and present the data resulting from the end to end assembly and validation of our hardware across multiple vendors and sites.

This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will work closely across teams both internal and external to define the standards that will be used across our products to ensure the velocity and quality of our 1P hardware. You will own the implementation, deployment, and output of these systems as well their continued maintenance and SLAs.

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite). Relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will:

• Design, develop, and maintain the software infrastructure for manufacturing process execution and data export.

• Own integration across internal customers and vendor systems and processes.

• Build and maintain the CI, release, and delivery pipeline of tooling to external partners.

• Build and maintain internal systems to ingest, process, deliver, and visualize critical data for internal teams and systems.

• Build system health monitoring, telemetry, remote diagnostics, and recovery paths that make manufacturing failures traceable and actionable.

• Develop automation frameworks and monitoring for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, and long-term reliability.

• Package engineering releases into manufacturing-ready software recipes: images, versions, logs, limits, remediation mapping, provisioning hooks, secure artifact handling, and traceable data export.

• Debug complex production issues spanning hardware, firmware, kernel, services, networking, power, thermals, boot, provisioning, manufacturing, test, and cloud services.

• Partner with hardware, firmware, security, networking, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and external engineering teams to define software contracts, unblock bring-up, and drive issues to closure.

• Produce durable architecture notes.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of hands-on experience software, hardware diagnostics, and cloud infrastructure.

• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.

• Familiarity with scripting in languages such as shell and python as used in automation systems.

• Familiarity with Linux-based hardware platforms, OpenBMC, Redfish, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, and fleet management software.

• Demonstrated ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, Linux tooling, and carefully controlled experiments.

• Experience with hardware bring-ups.

• Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries, and to turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, designs, tests, and decisions.

• Proven track record working with external vendors, manufacturing partners, or partner engineering teams to define deliverables, review technical work, and drive issues to closure.

• Familiarity with platform security topics such as secure boot, firmware signing, device provisioning, attestation, certificate handling, trusted update flows, or access-control design is a plus.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.

Compensation

$310K – $460K + Offers Equity