Senior HW Test Engineer

About the Role

We're seeking a Senior Hardware Test Engineer to build and scale the systems that validate our hardware platforms from concept to mass production. You'll develop the software, infrastructure, and test coverage that ensure every product we ship meets our bar for quality, reliability, and security-across labs, factories, and real-world use.

This role involves writing robust hardware-facing software, architecting test platforms across embedded and host environments, and defining the testability of future products. You'll work closely with hardware, firmware, and factory engineering teams to ensure telemetry, data integrity, and fraud resistance are first-class citizens in our validation story.

If you thrive at the intersection of hardware and software, and enjoy turning ambiguous bring-up phases into scalable test and data systems, we'd love to hear from you.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement test frameworks for factory and lab validation across multiple hardware platforms.

• Develop software in C, Objective-C, Python, or Lua for host and embedded environments, depending on the product's architecture and test goals.

• Build and maintain infrastructure for early-stage bring-up, enabling validation of emerging compute components under realistic workload profiles.

• Create DSLs, shims, and abstraction layers to accelerate test development and factory adoption.

• Implement CI/CD pipelines, monitoring systems, and fraud detection for secure and reliable test execution.

• Work cross-functionally with firmware, systems, and machine learning teams to develop early test hooks and telemetry for data-driven debugging.

• Design telemetry and diagnostic tooling that connects factory, reliability, and field insights into a cohesive view of product quality.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 7+ years of experience working at the hardware-software boundary, especially in high-scale consumer electronics or embedded systems.

• Are fluent across multiple layers of the stack-from writing low-level test code to building host-side analysis tools and test orchestration infrastructure.

• Have deep understanding of how to architect validation systems that distinguish hardware issues from software instability.

• Are experienced with manufacturing environments, including test station software, data integrity, and factory security models.

• Have worked on complex embedded systems with integrated firmware and sensor calibration requirements.

• Enjoy building tooling that others depend on-from hardware teams to reliability engineers to ML researchers.

• Can simplify complexity for cross-functional teams and lead ambiguous, emergent validation efforts.

This is a foundational role for building confidence in the products we ship-whether they're fresh off the line or deep into their lifecycle.

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.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.

Compensation Range: $460K