Data Engineer, Hardware & Consumer Devices

About the team

OpenAI is building a new generation of AI-powered consumer devices, creating opportunities to bring increasingly capable AI into people's everyday lives.

Our Data Engineering team is responsible for establishing the foundational data infrastructure that supports the development, manufacturing, launch, and ongoing operation of these products. We're building the systems that connect information across the entire device lifecycle, enabling engineering, operations, and Data Science partners to understand product performance, identify problems, and make better decisions.

This is an early-stage organization with significant greenfield opportunities. We're looking for engineers who want to shape the technical foundations of a rapidly growing business and establish systems that will scale alongside our products.

About the role:

As a Data Engineer, you'll design, build, and scale the data infrastructure that powers OpenAI's hardware and consumer devices organization.

You'll tackle technically challenging problems involving complex data sources, evolving operational requirements, and systems that need to scale from early development through manufacturing and consumer deployment.

Unlike roles focused primarily on supporting individual analytics projects, this position emphasizes building durable, reusable data foundations that enable multiple teams and use cases.

You'll have significant ownership over technical decisions, work closely with partners across engineering, manufacturing, operations, and Data Science, and help define how we approach Data Engineering as the organization grows.

In this role, you will:

• Build foundational data infrastructure: Design and implement reliable, scalable data pipelines, platforms, and datasets that support hardware development, manufacturing, customer operations, and device performance.

• Connect complex data ecosystems: Integrate information across manufacturing systems, factory operations, device telemetry, quality assurance, and customer-facing operational systems.

• Establish durable data models: Develop reusable datasets and data architectures that enable consistent measurement, investigation, and decision-making across multiple teams.

• Enable manufacturing and quality intelligence: Connect manufacturing conditions and production history with downstream product performance, reliability, returns, and failure signals.

• Prepare for scale: Design systems that evolve from early-stage development and initial production to increasingly complex operations and large-scale consumer deployment.

• Partner across disciplines: Work with hardware and software engineers, manufacturing teams, operations leaders, and Data Scientists to translate emerging requirements into robust technical solutions.

• Shape our technical direction: Help establish engineering standards, architectural principles, data quality practices, and infrastructure decisions that will influence the organization for years to come.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are comfortable making architectural decisions as requirements evolve and the right solutions aren't immediately obvious.

• Are highly self-directed and can take broad, ambiguous problems from exploration through implementation.

• Enjoy working directly with cross-functional partners and understanding how technical decisions affect real products and operational outcomes.

• Have a builder's mentality and are energized by creating foundational systems rather than exclusively optimizing mature infrastructure.

• Hold a high bar for engineering quality while remaining pragmatic about the speed and flexibility required in an early-stage environment.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Have exceptional Data Engineering fundamentals and a track record of designing, building, and operating complex data systems.

• Bring strong technical judgment around data architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, reliability, and scalability.

• Have experience developing production-grade pipelines and infrastructure across heterogeneous data sources.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience with hardware, consumer electronics, connected devices, or IoT.

• Experience building data infrastructure for manufacturing, factory operations, or supply-chain systems.

• Familiarity with device telemetry, reliability engineering, product quality, or failure analysis.

• Experience supporting customer operations, technical support, or Trust & Safety.

• A track record of building data platforms or foundational infrastructure in a startup or rapidly scaling organization.

Prior hardware experience is not required. We value exceptional engineering ability, intellectual curiosity, and the capacity to learn new domains quickly.

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.

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 information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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