OpenAI
Firmware Engineer, Robotics
About this role
Lead firmware architecture for next-generation robotics hardware, owning embedded systems design from boot through production. You'll balance rapid prototyping with safety-critical reliability, partnering across hardware and AI teams to bring innovative robot systems to market.
What you'll do
- Design and architect embedded firmware stack including RTOS, boot, peripheral control, power management, and diagnostics
- Define safety-critical mechanisms, fault detection, recovery strategies, and safe-state behaviors
- Lead hardware bring-up and set execution pace for rapid iteration and learning
- Establish engineering standards for reliability, fault tolerance, observability, and maintainability
- Build validation and testing strategies including unit, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, and failure-injection tests
- Mentor firmware engineers and drive culture of technical rigor with practical judgment
What they're looking for
- Embedded firmware development in iterative environments
- Rust programming language (especially embedded systems)
- Real-time systems and low-level hardware concepts
- Safety-critical system design and fault tolerance
- Hardware bring-up and end-to-end ownership
- Architecture leadership for complex embedded products
- Cross-disciplinary communication
- AI-assisted coding tools (Codex, Claude, etc.)
Benefits
- Based in San Francisco with 4 days/week in-office expectation
- Relocation assistance provided
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OpenAI
OpenAI builds AI infrastructure and products, including large-scale data center campuses for AI computing and generative AI applications for enterprise customers. The company is hiring civil engineers, project engineers, electrical design engineers, data center R&D engineers, and AI deployment engineers to expand its infrastructure capabilities and help customers deploy AI solutions.
View all jobs at OpenAILikely interview questions
- Tell us about a time you owned firmware architecture for a safety-critical or high-consequence system from prototype through production. What were the biggest risks, and how did you design for fault tolerance and diagnosability?
- Describe your experience with Rust in embedded systems. How have you leveraged its memory safety properties to prevent common firmware bugs, and what tradeoffs have you made for performance or real-time constraints?