Firmware Engineer, Robotics

About the Team

We are building general-purpose robotics. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure. In the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have extensive experience developing firmware in an iterative environment.
• Get a thrill from bringing up new hardware and taking end-to-end ownership over ensuring it works.
• Have led architecture and delivery for complex embedded products that shipped to real users or operated in demanding production environments.
• Are deeply fluent in low-level languages (we use Rust!) and comfortable working close to hardware under real-time constraints.
• Understand embedded systems from first principles, including interrupts, scheduling, memory layout, buses, DMA, timing behavior, and failure modes.
• Have strong instincts for defensive design, fault containment, validation depth, and post-deployment diagnosability.
• Know when to build the durable system and when to produce the fastest credible artifact that unlocks the next decision.
• Communicate clearly across disciplines and can turn ambiguity into sound technical direction.
• Care about building systems that are not only fast and capable, but also trustworthy.
• Make heavy use of Codex, Claude Code, or similar AI-assisted coding systems to accelerate implementation, prototyping, debugging, and iteration.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

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Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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