{"id":1096768,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-operating-systems-engineer-linux-kernel-consumer-devices","title":"Operating Systems Engineer, Linux Kernel | Consumer Devices","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":79,"open_postings":198,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.833,"repost_share":0.01,"time_to_fill_p50_days":51,"computed_at":"2026-11-06T05:58:05Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":230000,"max":385000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":385000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-21T18:13:44Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-21","last_verified_at":"2026-11-06T17:14:39Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":46,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":46},"description":"About the Team\nOpenAI 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.\nOur 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.\nAbout the Role\nAs 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.\nYour 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.\nIn this role, you will:\nBuild kernel capabilities: Design, implement, and maintain Linux kernel subsystem changes that support device capabilities and product requirements.\n\nOwn 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.\n\nDebug complex system behavior: Use tracing, profiling, instrumentation, and diagnostic tools to resolve correctness, concurrency, performance, power, and reliability issues in development and production.\n\nMeasure and validate improvements: Develop tests and representative workloads to demonstrate repeatable performance, power, and reliability gains and detect regressions across kernel and userspace.\n\nPartner across disciplines: Work with hardware, firmware, platform, and application engineers to turn system requirements into understandable, maintainable solutions.\n\nContribute 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.\n\nMinimum Qualifications\nSubstantial 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.\n\nProficiency in C for kernel and low-level systems development.\n\nStrong understanding of kernel concurrency, synchronization, memory ownership, and resource lifetimes.\n\nExperience delivering systems capabilities across kernel and userspace, including designing interfaces and diagnosing problems that cross that boundary.\n\nUnderstanding of Linux kernel development principles and practices: maintainable designs, appropriate abstractions, reviewable patches, compatibility awareness, and careful validation to prevent regressions.\n\nYou might thrive in this role if you:\nAre proficient in Rust for systems programming, with experience developing Linux kernel code in Rust alongside C.\n\nParticipate in the Linux community through patches, code review, testing, bug reports, technical discussions, or collaboration with subsystem maintainers.\n\nTake ownership of complete solutions and follow problems across system boundaries.\n\nMake careful tradeoffs among functionality, security, performance, power, and maintainability, and explain your decisions with evidence.\n\nWork constructively through technical review and communicate clearly with teammates across disciplines.\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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