{"id":931,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-hardware-operations-engineer","title":"Hardware Operations Engineer","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":77,"open_postings":191,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.911,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":51,"computed_at":"2026-10-16T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Hardware","role_family":"Hardware","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States","Seattle, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":157000,"max":302000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":302000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"HPC","optional":true},{"name":"Linux","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-20T14:11:56Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-16T22:36:25Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":118,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":118},"description":"About the Team\nOpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Our Industrial Compute organization develops and deploys large-scale AI campuses designed to support the next generation of frontier model training and inference workloads.\nThe Hardware Operations team is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and lifecycle health of OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. We partner closely with Data Center Operations, Fleet Health Engineering, Manufacturing, Network Infrastructure, Capacity Planning, and our infrastructure partners to maintain world-class operational performance across rapidly expanding AI environments.\nAs we scale globally, we are building the operational frameworks, reliability standards, and sustaining engineering practices required to support thousands of GPUs and servers across multiple campuses.\nAbout the Role\nWe are seeking a Hardware Operations Engineer to serve as the technical authority for hardware reliability and fleet health at one of OpenAI’s flagship AI campuses.\nThis role operates at the intersection of hardware operations, sustaining engineering, and fleet reliability. You will partner closely with Cloud Service Provider operations teams, OpenAI fleet-health engineers, hardware engineering teams, and OEM vendors to identify, diagnose, and resolve hardware issues affecting production systems.\nBeyond day-to-day operational support, you will drive root cause investigations, reliability improvement initiatives, lifecycle management programs, and operational readiness efforts. You will help establish hardware maintenance standards, operational procedures, and best practices that scale across future OpenAI infrastructure deployments.\nThe ideal candidate combines deep hands-on datacenter hardware expertise with strong troubleshooting, failure analysis, and cross-functional leadership skills.\nCandidates must be able to sit onsite at our datacenters 5 days per week.\nKey Responsibilities\nDrive technical triage and resolution of complex hardware failures impacting production systems.\n\nPartner with Fleet Health Engineering to investigate recurring hardware issues, identify failure patterns, and improve fleet reliability.\n\nLead root cause analysis (RCA) efforts for critical hardware incidents and develop corrective and preventive action plans.\n\nCollaborate with Cloud Service Provider operations teams and OEM vendors to coordinate repairs, replacements, upgrades, and hardware lifecycle activities.\n\nEstablish and continuously improve hardware maintenance procedures, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting standards.\n\nAnalyze hardware failure trends and operational metrics to identify reliability risks and improvement opportunities.\n\nSupport new hardware introductions, validation activities, and production readiness reviews.\n\nCoordinate spare parts strategy and inventory planning with supply chain and site teams.\n\nPartner with Hardware Engineering, Manufacturing, and Infrastructure teams to provide field feedback that improves future platform designs.\n\nDevelop scalable operational standards and best practices that can be deployed across future Stargate campuses.\n\nMentor on-site technicians and partner teams on advanced troubleshooting methodologies and hardware operational excellence.\n\nQualifications\n8+ years of experience supporting large-scale datacenter hardware infrastructure, with experience in a senior technician, sustaining engineering, or hardware operations leadership role.\n\nDeep expertise with server platforms, GPU systems, storage infrastructure, rack integration, and datacenter hardware architecture.\n\nStrong experience diagnosing complex hardware failures and leading repair efforts in production environments.\n\nExperience conducting root cause analysis and driving long-term corrective actions.\n\nStrong understanding of hardware reliability engineering principles and fleet-health management.\n\nProven ability to partner effectively across engineering, operations, manufacturing, and vendor organizations.\n\nComfortable operating independently in high-priority production environments with significant operational responsibility.\n\nExcellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence technical and operational decisions.\n\nExperience developing operational processes, maintenance standards, and technical documentation.\n\nAbility to travel occasionally to support new campus deployments and operational readiness activities.\n\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience supporting large-scale GPU clusters or AI/ML infrastructure environments.\n\nFamiliarity with fleet health systems, telemetry platforms, and hardware monitoring tools.\n\nAbility to identify appropriate data and perform detailed analysis to support all elements of this role, including dashboard development\n\nExperience with failure analysis methodologies such as FRACAS, RCCA, 5-Why, Fishbone, or FMEA.\n\nKnowledge of Linux system administration and hardware validation workflows.\n\nExperience supporting hyperscale datacenter operations or HPC environments.\n\nFamiliarity with server manufacturing, rack integration, and NPI-to-sustaining transitions.\n\nIndustry certifications such as CompTIA Server+, OEM hardware certifications, or equivalent experience.\n\nExperience applying Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) practices in mission-critical datacenter environments.\n\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt 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. 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