Host Systems Software Engineer

About the Team
OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

About the Role
We’re looking for an experienced systems software engineer to help define and build the host software stack for our custom next-generation AI systems. You will work close to the hardware on performance-critical software, including Linux kernel drivers, high-throughput I/O paths, and system-scale networking and RDMA.

This role spans architecture, implementation, platform bring-up, debugging, and performance optimization. You will work across hardware and software boundaries to make new systems usable end to end, from low-level device interfaces through userspace tooling and production validation.

In this role you will:

• Design, implement, and debug host-side systems software for AI infrastructure, including Linux kernel drivers and supporting userspace components.

• Build and optimize software paths for high-throughput, low-latency communication, including RDMA and related networking functionality.

• Develop software around PCIe, DMA, NICs, accelerators, memory movement, and device interaction.

• Bring up new hardware platforms and diagnose complex issues across kernel, firmware, networking, and hardware boundaries.

• Build tooling for integration, testing, diagnostics, observability, qualification, and performance characterization.

• Collaborate with hardware, networking, and platform teams to define interfaces and integrate new capabilities.

• Work with external vendors where needed to integrate technologies and drive issues to resolution.

• Contribute across the systems software stack as the platform and team evolve.

• Help shape the technical direction and engineering practices for a growing systems software stack.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Experience building low-level or performance-critical systems software.

• Strong progra