Software Acceleration Engineer, Consumer Products

About the Team

The Software Acceleration team is responsible for building the tools, systems, and processes that super-charge engineering velocity across our consumer hardware and software stack. We partner with hardware, embedded, and cloud teams to remove friction, reduce toil, and improve code health—while keeping build and release pipelines fast, scalable, and reliable.

About the Role

As a Software Acceleration Engineer, you will design and build the infrastructure and developer tools that enable rapid, high-quality engineering across embedded, application, and cloud layers. You’ll work directly with cross-functional teams to identify pain points, create scalable solutions, and ensure our build and release systems remain performant and reproducible.

We’re looking for engineers who are passionate about accelerating development workflows, improving code health, and architecting systems that make other engineers more productive.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 4 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Engineering acceleration & tooling: Design, develop, and maintain systems that speed up development workflows, reduce manual effort, and raise product quality across embedded, application, and cloud layers.

• Cross-team enablement: Work directly with hardware and software teams to map pain points, capture requirements, and build tools that solve real-world bottlenecks.

• Existing ecosystem integration: Collaborate with the broader Engineering Acceleration team to adopt and evolve their internal systems for the unique needs of consumer hardware and software.

• Code organization & health: Drive consistent code structure, dependency management, and hygiene across heterogeneous stacks and third-party vendor integrations.

• Build & infrastructure systems: Architect and scale performant build systems from on-device embedded software to cloud infrastructure, ensuring reproducibility and rapid iteration.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep experience designing and building scalable software systems.

• Are proficient in Python, C, C++, or Rust, with solid Linux fundamentals (build systems, networking, process management).

• Have a strong desire to architect systems that accelerate engineering velocity while simultaneously improving product quality.

• Empathize with the frustrations and processes that slow engineering teams down, informed by hands-on experience.

• (Nice to have) Are familiar with Git, Bazel, Terraform, Buildkite, Postgres, Cosmos DB, FastAPI, or similar tooling.

• (Nice to have) Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn new skills and share knowledge clearly and concisely.

• (Nice to have) Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions, seeing change as an opportunity to add structure and order when needed.

• (Nice to have) Have experience maintaining a quality bar and engineering velocity for products shipped at large scale.

• (Nice to have) Have built and developed engineering systems at an early stage from zero to one.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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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.