Data Engineer, Hardware & Consumer Devices

About the Position

Data Engineer, Hardware & Consumer Devices

San Francisco

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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.

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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.

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Responsibilities

• 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.

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Requirements

• Minimum Qualifications:

  • Exceptional Data Engineering fundamentals and a track record of designing, building, and operating complex data systems.
  • Strong technical judgment around data architecture, distributed systems, data modeling, reliability, and scalability.
  • 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.

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About the Company

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.

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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.