Firmware Lead, Robotics

About the Team We are building general-purpose robotics. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure. In the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research. About the Role As a Firmware Lead, you will define and drive the architecture of embedded systems for next-generation hardware products. You will own foundational firmware decisions across real-time execution, device bring-up, hardware interfaces, fault handling, safety mechanisms, and production readiness. We’re looking for someone with deep experience building safety-critical or high-consequence systems, where failures can have meaningful consequences. You should be comfortable reasoning about risk, designing for diagnosability and graceful degradation, and creating engineering practices that raise the reliability bar for the entire team. You should also be unusually good at moving fast. Sometimes the right answer is a carefully reviewed architecture that will endure for years; sometimes it is getting a rough-but-useful prototype working by the end of the afternoon so the team can learn something concrete tomorrow. We value engineers who know the difference, make that call well, and can operate credibly in both modes. You will be both a technical leader and a hands-on builder: setting direction, reviewing critical designs, unblocking the hardest problems, and writing production firmware when it matters most. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 5 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Rapidly bring up new hardware and set execution pace for the team. - Lead firmware architecture for embedded systems spanning boot, RTOS/runtime behavior, peripheral control, power management, communications, and field diagnostics. - Define engineering standards for reliability, fault tolerance, observability, and maintainability across the firmware stack. - Design and review safety-critical mechanisms, including fault detection, recovery paths, watchdog strategies, redundancy where appropriate, and safe-state behavior. - Build quick, scrappy prototypes when speed of learning matters, then harden the right ideas into production-quality systems. - Partner closely with engineers in hardware, software, and AI research from early prototype through production. - Build rigorous bring-up, validation, and release processes for embedded platforms. - Establish testing strategies across unit, hardware-in-the-loop, integration, stress, and failure-injection testing. - Drive root-cause analysis for subtle hardware, firmware, and system interactions. - Make clear tradeoffs across performance, memory, power, schedule, and safety. - Mentor firmware engineers and help shape a culture of urgency, technical rigor, practical judgment, and high-quality execution. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have extensive experience developing firmware in an iterative environment. - Get a thrill from bringing up new hardware and taking end-to-end ownership over ensuring it works. - Have led architecture and delivery for complex embedded products that shipped to real users or operated in demanding production environments. - Are deeply fluent in low-level languages (we use Rust!) and comfortable working close to hardware under real-time constraints. - Understand embedded systems from first principles, including interrupts, scheduling, memory layout, buses, DMA, timing behavior, and failure modes. - Have strong instincts for defensive design, fault containment, validation depth, and post-deployment diagnosability. - Know when to build the durable system and when to produce the fastest credible artifact that unlocks the next decision. - Communicate clearly across disciplines and can turn ambiguity into sound technical direction. - Care about building systems that are not only fast and capable, but also trustworthy. - Make heavy use of Codex, Claude Code, or similar AI-assisted coding systems to accelerate implementation, prototyping, debugging, and iteration. Nice to have: - Experience with Rust in embedded environments. - Experience with Embassy or other async embedded Rust frameworks. - Familiarity with mixed-language firmware architectures, including introducing Rust incrementally into existing C/C++ systems. - Experience with ARM Cortex-M or Cortex-R platforms, RTOSes, and low-power embedded designs. - Experience building firmware for sensor-rich, latency-sensitive, or tightly integrated electromechanical products. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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