Systems Software Engineer, BMC & Management Plane

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

About the Role

We're seeking a Systems Software Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team, with a focus on BMC software and embedded Linux services for server and accelerator manageability. You will personally design, build, integrate, and validate software that monitors hardware health, exposes inventory and telemetry, controls power, and manages firmware updates and recovery across OpenAI’s first-party AI hardware systems.

You will work across BMC, Linux, firmware interfaces, automation infrastructure, boot and recovery, hardware diagnostics, telemetry, host and platform drivers, network software interfaces, and manufacturing and fleet readiness. A major part of this role is owning the acceptance path for partner-delivered system software: defining requirements, reviewing code and artifacts, reproducing builds, building tests, pushing fixes, and producing the evidence needed for launch decisions.

This role is hands-on and high-ownership. You will write and review low-level software, debug issues across hardware and software boundaries, build infrastructure and automation to test and manage devices in the lab, guide partner deliverables, build validation evidence, and help carry platforms from bring-up through production deployment.

Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite)

Relocation assistance available.

In this role, you will

• Design, develop, and maintain low-level firmware and system software for first-party AI hardware manageability, with an emphasis on BMC software and embedded Linux services, including Redfish services, gNMI telemetry, firmware update and recovery flows, BIOS/UEFI interactions, platform drivers, and hardware diagnostics.
• 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.
• 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 infrastructure for testing and managing systems in our 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.
• 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 that help OpenAI and partner teams reproduce, operate, and improve the platform.

You might thrive in this role if you have

• Strong programming skills in C, C++, Rust or similar systems languages, with experience building reliable software for real hardware.
• Hands-on embedded Linux development experience, including personally implementing and debugging user-space services or daemons that interact with hardware and firmware. Relevant supporting experience includes Redfish, BMCWeb, IPMI, BIOS/UEFI, bootloaders, firmware update systems, kernel drivers, RTOS, or fleet management software.
• Experience developing BMC or OpenBMC or comparable hardware-management software for servers, accelerators, storage, or networking platforms is preferred. Prior BMC experience is not required for candidates with strong programming skills and hands-on embedded Linux development experience. Production data-center manageability experience is strongly preferred.
• 7+ years of hands-on experience, or exceptional accomplishments demonstrating equivalent expertise, in low-level system software, embedded software, firmware, BMC software, platform software, device drivers, or hardware diagnostics.
• 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, and carefully controlled experiments.
• Experience with hardware bring-up, manufacturing or qualification testing, system diagnostics, release validation, or deployment of high-performance compute, accelerator, server, networking, storage, or embedded platforms.
• Ability to reason across software, firmware, hardware, manufacturing, and operations boundaries, and to turn ambiguous problems into clear requirements, designs, tests, and decisions.
• Proven track record working with external vendors, manufacturing partners, or partner engineering teams to define deliverables, review technical work, and drive issues to closure.
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