Operating Systems Engineer, Linux Kernel | Consumer Devices

ABOUT THE TEAM OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. Our team works across custom silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the platforms behind them. We connect kernel development with the broader software stack to deliver complete product capabilities. ABOUT THE ROLE As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on the Linux kernel, you will design, develop, and maintain the kernel capabilities that underpin OpenAI’s consumer devices. You’ll bring deep expertise in one or more Linux kernel subsystems and carry solutions through the higher-level software stack. Your ownership will extend into the userspace services, libraries, tools, and interfaces needed to deliver complete product features. You’ll shape the boundaries between kernel and userspace, make design decisions across the stack, and see your work through development, integration, and production. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Build kernel capabilities: Design, implement, and maintain Linux kernel subsystem changes that support device capabilities and product requirements. - Own features across the stack: Choose appropriate kernel and userspace boundaries, and build the interfaces and supporting components needed to deliver reliable features in shipped products. - Debug complex system behavior: Use tracing, profiling, instrumentation, and diagnostic tools to resolve correctness, concurrency, performance, power, and reliability issues in development and production. - Measure and validate improvements: Develop tests and representative workloads to demonstrate repeatable performance, power, and reliability gains and detect regressions across kernel and userspace. - Partner across disciplines: Work with hardware, firmware, platform, and application engineers to turn system requirements into understandable, maintainable solutions. - Contribute sustainable kernel changes: Prepare reviewable patches, incorporate feedback, and contribute fixes and improvements upstream where appropriate. Maintain product-specific changes responsibly as the kernel evolves. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - Substantial hands-on experience designing, developing, and debugging one or more Linux kernel subsystems, such as memory management, storage, networking, high-speed peripherals, power management, scheduling, or virtualization. - Proficiency in C for kernel and low-level systems development. - Strong understanding of kernel concurrency, synchronization, memory ownership, and resource lifetimes. - Experience delivering systems capabilities across kernel and userspace, including designing interfaces and diagnosing problems that cross that boundary. - Understanding of Linux kernel development principles and practices: maintainable designs, appropriate abstractions, reviewable patches, compatibility awareness, and careful validation to prevent regressions. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Are proficient in Rust for systems programming, with experience developing Linux kernel code in Rust alongside C. - Participate in the Linux community through patches, code review, testing, bug reports, technical discussions, or collaboration with subsystem maintainers. - Take ownership of complete solutions and follow problems across system boundaries. - Make careful tradeoffs among functionality, security, performance, power, and maintainability, and explain your decisions with evidence. - Work constructively through technical review and communicate clearly with teammates across disciplines. 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. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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 inf