# Firmware Engineer, Robotics

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Embedded Engineering
**Salary:** $185k – $268k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** Rust, Embedded Systems, Rtos, Arm Cortex-M, Arm Cortex-R, Firmware Development, Safety-Critical Systems, Hardware Bring-Up, Fault Tolerance, Real-Time Systems
**Posted:** 2026-06-05

> Lead firmware architecture and development for robotics hardware, owning embedded systems design, safety-critical mechanisms, and production readiness. Requires deep experience with Rust, real-time systems, and safety-critical environments.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Rapidly bring up new hardware and set execution pace for the team.
- Lead firmware architecture for embedded systems spanning boot, RTOS/runtime behavior, peripheral control, power management, communications, and field diagnostics.
- Define engineering standards for reliability, fault tolerance, observability, and maintainability across the firmware stack.
- Design and review safety-critical mechanisms, including fault detection, recovery paths, watchdog strategies, redundancy where appropriate, and safe-state behavior.
- Build quick, scrappy prototypes when speed of learning matters, then harden the right ideas into production-quality systems.
- Partner closely with engineers in hardware, software, and AI research from early prototype through production.
- Build rigorous bring-up, validation, and release processes for embedded platforms.
- Establish testing strategies across unit, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, stress, and failure-injection testing.
- Drive root-cause analysis for subtle hardware, firmware, and system interactions.
- Make clear tradeoffs across performance, memory, power, schedule, and safety.
- Mentor firmware engineers and help shape a culture of urgency, technical rigor, practical judgment, and high-quality execution.

## Requirements
- Extensive experience developing firmware in an iterative environment.
- Experience bringing up new hardware and taking end-to-end ownership.
- Led architecture and delivery for complex embedded products that shipped to real users or operated in demanding production environments.
- Deep fluency in low-level languages (Rust) and comfortable working close to hardware under real-time constraints.
- Strong understanding of embedded systems from first principles, including interrupts, scheduling, memory layout, buses, DMA, timing behavior, and failure modes.
- Strong instincts for defensive design, fault containment, validation depth, and post-deployment diagnosability.
- Ability to communicate clearly across disciplines and turn ambiguity into sound technical direction.
- Experience making heavy use of AI-assisted coding systems (Codex, Claude Code, or similar) to accelerate implementation, prototyping, debugging, and iteration.

## Nice to Have
- Experience with Rust in embedded environments.
- Experience with Embassy or other async embedded Rust frameworks.
- Familiarity with mixed-language firmware architectures, including introducing Rust incrementally into existing C/C++ systems.
- Experience with ARM Cortex-M or Cortex-R platforms, RTOSes, and low-power embedded designs.
- Experience building firmware for sensor-rich, latency-sensitive, or tightly integrated electromechanical products.

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