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OpenAIOpenAI

System Software Engineer, First-Party Hardware

Designs, builds, integrates, and validates low-level system software for AI hardware manageability, including BMC, firmware, drivers, and diagnostics. Owns partner software acceptance, automation, debugging across hardware-software boundaries, and production deployment for high-performance compute systems. Requires 7+ years in systems/embedded software.

About the job

Responsibilities

  • Design, develop, and maintain low-level firmware and system software for first-party AI hardware manageability, including BMC software, Redfish services, gNMI telemetry, firmware update and recovery flows, BIOS/UEFI interactions, platform drivers, and hardware diagnostics.
  • Own integration and acceptance of partner and vendor software releases, including requirements, code and artifact review, reproducible builds, CI, regression monitoring, version tracking, acceptance criteria, and launch-readiness evidence.
  • Build and maintain automation and CI infra for testing and managing systems in lab.
  • Define and debug hardware management protocols across accelerators, host systems, management controllers, firmware, and platform services, including interfaces such as I2C, SMBus, PMBus, PCIe, Ethernet, GPIO, UART, and JTAG.
  • Build system health monitoring, telemetry, remote diagnostics, and recovery paths that make hardware failures diagnosable in the lab, at manufacturing partners, and in production data centers.
  • Develop validation and test automation for board bring-up, rack bring-up, qualification, manufacturing readiness, deployment readiness, and long-term reliability.
  • Convert 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 signals, BMC firmware, BIOS/UEFI, kernel drivers, platform services, network topology, PCIe behavior, power, thermals, boot, provisioning, and manufacturing test.
  • 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, runbooks, validation records, and decision documents.

Requirements

  • 7+ years of hands-on experience in low-level system software, embedded software, firmware, BMC software, platform software, device drivers, or hardware diagnostics.
  • Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages.
  • Experience with Linux-based hardware platforms, embedded Linux, OpenBMC, Redfish, BMCWeb, IPMI, BIOS/UEFI, bootloaders, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, RTOS, or fleet management software.
  • Strong knowledge of hardware/software interfaces such as I2C, SMBus, PMBus, SPI, PCIe, Ethernet, USB, UART, GPIO, JTAG, power controllers, board-level debug tools, or protocol analyzers.
  • Demonstrated ability to debug live hardware using logs, packet captures, firmware traces, bus captures, lab hosts, BMC journals, Linux tooling.
  • Experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance compute platforms.
  • Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries.
  • Proven track record working with external vendors or partner engineering teams.

Nice-to-Haves

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

Skills

C, C++, Rust, Linux, Openbmc, Redfish, Bmc, Ipmi, Bios/Uefi, I2C, Smbus, Pmbus, Pcie, Ethernet, Gpio

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