System Software Engineer

About the Team

The scaling team collaborates to design AI supercomputing systems, pushing the boundaries of hardware and infrastructure innovation.

About the Role

We're seeking a System Software Engineer to join our scaling team. In this role, you’ll design, develop, and implement low-level manageability software, including BMC software, system health monitoring, and hardware diagnostics for manufacturing and testing. You’ll work with open technologies like OpenBMC and Redfish, integrating with third-party hardware and customized software solutions.
This role involves close collaboration with hardware, software, and systems engineers to ensure our supercomputers deliver top-tier performance, reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS). You'll also review and guide third-party vendors to meet stringent technical and quality standards.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain firmware/software for supercomputer hardware manageability, focusing on BMC, Redfish, secure boot, firmware updates, and BIOS/UEFI.

• Collaborate with hardware teams and external vendors to define and develop diagnostics and qualification software for advanced compute hardware.

• Lead and define software manageability requirements with vendors, review deliverables, and manage third-party software integration.

• Monitor vendor firmware development, ensuring adherence to technical standards, timelines, and quality metrics.

• Integrate BMC monitoring software into fleet-wide management systems.

• Enhance OpenBMC firmware for system monitoring, power/cooling management, machine health, and diagnostics.

• Implement and optimize bootloaders, device drivers, debuggers, and low-level system software.

• Debug, test, and validate firmware/software for reliability in complex, high-power environments.

• Design and execute system-level power, thermal management, and fan control strategies.

• Drive firmware architecture innovations to meet performance, security, and power efficiency goals.

• Collaborate cross-functionally with hardware, system architecture, power, and cooling teams.

• Support mass production readiness through scalable software/firmware solutions.

• Troubleshoot hardware-firmware interface issues during development and testing.

Qualifications

• Experience with OpenBMC in managing accelerators or SoCs.

• Proficiency in C, C++, and Rust for embedded systems.

• Strong knowledge of hardware interfaces: I2C, SPI, PCIe, Ethernet, USB.

• Hardware/software co-design experience in large-scale compute systems.

• Proven track record defining and managing vendor relationships and deliverables.

• Understanding of system monitoring in HPC environments and fleet management software.

• Embedded systems expertise, including bootloaders, drivers, and hardware-software interfacing.

• Familiarity with security best practices: RoTs, DICE, device provisioning, signing, attestation.

• Experience with version control, continuous integration, and build systems.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status.

For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.