Software Engineer, Compute Foundations Systems
AI research and deployment company building and deploying frontier AI products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and its API platform.
Projects
About OpenAI
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. It consists of the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group, a public benefit corporation governed by the Foundation.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will build, qualify, and maintain the Linux operating-system foundation for a frontier GPU compute fleet. You'll design reproducible OS images, integrate and test kernels, drivers, packages and firmware, bring up new hardware platforms with vendors, and debug complex failures across boot, firmware, disks and workloads. You'll also build tooling and automation that makes provisioning, maintenance and recovery predictable at fleet scale.
Requirements
- Significant experience building, integrating, or operating production Linux systems, particularly Ubuntu, Debian, or another major distribution
- Deep experience in Linux kernels/modules/drivers, distribution/package/OS-image engineering, boot/provisioning/disks, or firmware and driver integration
- Ability to write and maintain production-quality systems software and automation
- Understanding of building, testing, qualifying, and safely delivering system-level changes
- Ability to debug failures across hardware, firmware, boot, OS, kernel, and driver boundaries
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain the Linux host software stack for large GPU clusters
- Design reproducible OS-image builds, package and repository workflows, and system configuration
- Integrate, test, and qualify kernels, modules, drivers, packages, and firmware
- Build safe canary, rollback, and recovery paths for system changes
- Bring up new hardware platforms and compute SKUs with hardware engineers and vendors
- Debug complex system failures across boot, provisioning, firmware, disks, kernels, and drivers
- Improve provisioning, repave, maintenance, and recovery correctness
- Build systems tooling and diagnostics for validating and operating the fleet
Benefits
- Equity
- Performance-related bonus
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer HSA contributions
- Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter pre-tax accounts
- 401(k) with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents, 20 weeks for non-birthing parents)
- Paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Flexible PTO for exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays and coordinated company office closures
- Paid sick or safe time
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend
- Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Charitable donation matching and wellness stipends