---
title: 'Hardware Operations Engineer at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/hardware-operations-engineer-openai-san-francisco-6p5w780wga5e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Hardware Operations Engineer at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $157k–$302k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-20
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/b9a4a809-a965-4dbe-aeef-6ce1593903dd/application

**Skills:** Server platforms, GPU systems, Storage infrastructure, Rack integration, Datacenter hardware architecture, Hardware reliability engineering, Fleet-health management, Root cause analysis, Hardware failure diagnosis, Repair efforts, GPU clusters, AI/ML infrastructure, Fleet health systems, Telemetry platforms, Hardware monitoring tools, FRACAS, RCCA, 5-Why, Fishbone, FMEA

> Serve as the senior on-site technical authority for hardware reliability and fleet health at an AI campus. Drive root cause investigations, establish maintenance standards, and partner with engineering and vendor teams to resolve complex hardware failures and improve operational readiness.

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI, in close collaboration with our capital partners, is building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure ecosystem. Our Industrial Compute organization develops and deploys large-scale AI campuses designed to support the next generation of frontier model training and inference workloads. The Hardware Operations team is responsible for ensuring the reliability, availability, and lifecycle health of OpenAI’s compute infrastructure. We partner closely with Data Center Operations, Fleet Health Engineering, Manufacturing, Network Infrastructure, Capacity Planning, and our infrastructure partners to maintain world-class operational performance across rapidly expanding AI environments. As we scale globally, we are building the operational frameworks, reliability standards, and sustaining engineering practices required to support thousands of GPUs and servers across multiple campuses.

## About the Role

We are seeking a Hardware Operations Engineer to serve as the technical authority for hardware reliability and fleet health at one of OpenAI’s flagship AI campuses. This role operates at the intersection of hardware operations, sustaining engineering, and fleet reliability. You will partner closely with Cloud Service Provider operations teams, OpenAI fleet-health engineers, hardware engineering teams, and OEM vendors to identify, diagnose, and resolve hardware issues affecting production systems. Beyond day-to-day operational support, you will drive root cause investigations, reliability improvement initiatives, lifecycle management programs, and operational readiness efforts. You will help establish hardware maintenance standards, operational procedures, and best practices that scale across future OpenAI infrastructure deployments. The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on datacenter hardware expertise with strong troubleshooting, failure analysis, and cross-functional leadership skills. Candidates must be able to sit onsite at our datacenters 5 days per week.

## Key Responsibilities

- Drive technical triage and resolution of complex hardware failures impacting production systems.
- Partner with Fleet Health Engineering to investigate recurring hardware issues, identify failure patterns, and improve fleet reliability.
- Lead root cause analysis (RCA) efforts for critical hardware incidents and develop corrective and preventive action plans.
- Collaborate with Cloud Service Provider operations teams and OEM vendors to coordinate repairs, replacements, upgrades, and hardware lifecycle activities.
- Establish and continuously improve hardware maintenance procedures, operational runbooks, and troubleshooting standards.
- Analyze hardware failure trends and operational metrics to identify reliability risks and improvement opportunities.
- Support new hardware introductions, validation activities, and production readiness reviews.
- Coordinate spare parts strategy and inventory planning with supply chain and site teams.
- Partner with Hardware Engineering, Manufacturing, and Infrastructure teams to provide field feedback that improves future platform designs.
- Develop scalable operational standards and best practices that can be deployed across future Stargate campuses.
- Mentor on-site technicians and partner teams on advanced troubleshooting methodologies and hardware operational excellence.

## Qualifications

- 8+ years of experience supporting large-scale datacenter hardware infrastructure, with experience in a senior technician, sustaining engineering, or hardware operations leadership role.
- Deep expertise with server platforms, GPU systems, storage infrastructure, rack integration, and datacenter hardware architecture.
- Strong experience diagnosing complex hardware failures and leading repair efforts in production environments.
- Experience conducting root cause analysis and driving long-term corrective actions.
- Strong understanding of hardware reliability engineering principles and fleet-health management.
- Proven ability to partner effectively across engineering, operations, manufacturing, and vendor organizations.
- Comfortable operating independently in high-priority production environments with significant operational responsibility.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence technical and operational decisions.
- Experience developing operational processes, maintenance standards, and technical documentation.
- Ability to travel occasionally to support new campus deployments and operational readiness activities.

## Preferred Skills

- Experience supporting large-scale GPU clusters or AI/ML infrastructure environments.
- Familiarity with fleet health systems, telemetry platforms, and hardware monitoring tools.
- Ability to identify appropriate data and perform detailed analysis to support all elements of this role, including dashboard development
- Experience with failure analysis methodologies such as FRACAS, RCCA, 5-Why, Fishbone, or FMEA.
- Knowledge of Linux system administration and hardware validation workflows.
- Experience supporting hyperscale datacenter operations or HPC environments.
- Familiarity with server manufacturing, rack integration, and NPI-to-sustaining transitions.
- Industry certifications such as CompTIA Server+, OEM hardware certifications, or equivalent experience.
- Experience applying Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) practices in mission-critical datacenter environments.

## 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). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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