# System Software Engineer, First-Party Hardware

**Company:** [OpenAI](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/openai)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Embedded Engineering
**Salary:** $266k – $445k/yr
**Experience:** 7+ years
**Skills:** C, C++, Rust, Linux, Openbmc, Redfish, Bmc, Ipmi, Bios/Uefi, I2C, Smbus, Pmbus, Pcie, Ethernet, Gpio
**Posted:** 2026-05-07

> 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.

## Job Description

## 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.

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