OpenAI
Operating Systems Engineer | Consumer Devices
$230K–$342K
San Francisco · Full-time · Posted Aug 26, 2026
About the job
Build and harden operating-system foundations for consumer devices, spanning kernel and userspace components, security, performance, debugging, and application-facing interfaces.
What you'll do
- Develop and maintain OS components and core services, from kernel subsystems to userspace daemons.
- Implement security and privacy mechanisms, and establish performance, power, debugging, and observability practices.
- Provide stable platform interfaces and support production reliability, testing, and release readiness.
What they ask for
- Strong systems-programming experience, including meaningful kernel work and operating systems.
- Professional proficiency in C and C++ for low-level systems development.
- Experience building or maintaining core OS services and platform software.
- Track record debugging issues across kernel/userspace boundaries using tracing, profiling, and structured root-cause analysis.
Nice to have
- Production systems experience with Rust.
- Experience with OS security hardening, observability, performance and power optimization, or application/UI frameworks at the OS boundary.
Pay
$230K – $342K USD base salary
Tools
Linux, BSD, C, C++, Rust, ftrace, perf, eBPF
AI focus
The role builds operating-system foundations for OpenAI products that bring AI into the physical world; no specific AI development work is stated.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative