Operating Systems Engineer, Connectivity & Networking | Consumer Devices

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $230,000 - $385,000

About The Position

OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. The team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. This role offers the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI, helping to define a new category of products and shape how people experience AI in the future. The team works across systems software and product engineering to build reliable consumer devices and the platforms behind them, developing the connectivity and networking foundations that support communication across OpenAI products and systems.

As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on connectivity and networking, you will design, develop, and maintain the OS capabilities that enable reliable, secure, and efficient communication across OpenAI products and systems. Your work will span Wi-Fi and Bluetooth frameworks, IP networking, and advanced network services and policy. You’ll develop OS services, libraries, and interfaces for a broad range of connectivity needs, make design decisions across software boundaries, and carry solutions through development, integration, and production.

Requirements

• Substantial hands-on experience developing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionality in operating-system frameworks, system services, or connectivity middleware.
• Strong understanding of IP networking, including IPv4/IPv6, TCP/UDP, DNS, DHCP, routing, and socket behavior, with practical experience implementing and debugging networked systems.
• Experience implementing advanced networking capabilities in one or more areas such as routing and network policy, VPNs and tunneling, traffic management, or network isolation.
• Experience designing and maintaining platform APIs and the services behind them, including connection lifecycle management and integration with other OS components.
• Proficiency in C++ for systems development, including concurrent programming, memory ownership, and resource lifetime management.
• Strong understanding of asynchronous systems, interprocess communication, and failure handling.
• Experience diagnosing complex connectivity issues using system traces, protocol captures, logs, and structured debugging.
• Ability to work across disciplines, make sound technical tradeoffs, and carry solutions from investigation through implementation and validation.

Nice To Haves

• Have delivered connectivity capabilities in shipped products and resolved interoperability issues across software stacks and third-party implementations.
• Bring depth in transport protocols and performance, including QUIC, congestion control, multi-path networking, or operation across multiple network interfaces.
• Have experience with network virtualization, proxies, NAT, firewalls, or policy enforcement within an operating system.
• Have improved connectivity performance or power consumption, supported by repeatable measurements and regression coverage.
• Understand security and privacy considerations in connectivity services, including authentication, permissions, and credential handling.
• Are proficient in Rust for systems programming.
• Take ownership of complete solutions and follow problems across framework, service, and underlying stack boundaries.
• Use experiments and measurements to challenge assumptions and guide technical decisions.
• Work constructively across disciplines and make careful tradeoffs among functionality, security, reliability, performance, power, and maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Build connectivity foundations: Design, implement, and maintain OS services, frameworks, and APIs for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and IP networking.
• Develop reusable network capabilities: Build connection management, network configuration and selection, service discovery, and routing capabilities.
• Enable secure communication: Develop network services and policies for secure communication, traffic management, and isolation across varied network environments.
• Resolve issues across the stack: Investigate correctness, concurrency, interoperability, and reliability issues across OS components, protocol stacks, and application interfaces.
• Improve performance and efficiency: Use tracing, profiling, and repeatable measurements to improve latency, throughput, resource use, and power efficiency.
• Validate real-world reliability: Build diagnostic tools, representative workloads, and automated tests to validate interoperability and failure recovery across changing network and operating conditions, measure reliability improvements, and protect gains with regression coverage.
• Deliver maintainable product capabilities: Partner with hardware, firmware, security, platform, and application engineers to translate system requirements into shipped capabilities and clear, maintainable interfaces for integration and troubleshooting.

Benefits

• OpenAI is 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed