OpenAI

Operating Systems Engineer, On-Device Inference | Consumer Devices

OpenAI$150K — $180K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of hands-on experience with operating system components and performance-critical software development.
  • Proficient in C++ for systems development, particularly with concurrent programming.
  • Experience in optimizing inference runtimes or machine learning workloads in resource-constrained settings.
  • Strong knowledge of scheduling and memory management.
  • Skilled in diagnosing system behavior and delivering measurable performance or power enhancements.
  • Ability to translate research needs into technical requirements.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement OS services and frameworks for inference execution and resource management.
  • Collaborate with researchers on model fitting to meet device constraints.
  • Develop scheduling policies that optimize inference while maintaining system responsiveness.
  • Create strategies for performance and power management tailored to device conditions.
  • Debug performance issues across models and OS components using structured methods.
  • Build diagnostic tools to verify improvements in performance and energy efficiency.
  • Work with cross-functional teams to bring inference capabilities into production.

Benefits

  • Opportunity to work on advanced AI capabilities in consumer devices.
  • Collaborative environment with cross-disciplinary teams.
  • Exposure to cutting-edge technologies in machine learning.
  • Focus on solving real-world engineering problems.
  • Room for innovation and challenging assumptions in technical approaches.
Full Job Description
About the Role

As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference, you will design, develop, and ship the OS stack that makes advanced AI capabilities reliable, responsive, and energy efficient on consumer devices.

Your work will span OS services and frameworks, inference runtime integration, model fitting, scheduling, and performance and power management. You'll partner with research to adapt models to device constraints, make design decisions across the stack, and carry solutions from early exploration through integration and production.

In this role, you will:
  • Build the inference platform: Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management.
  • Fit models to device constraints: Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior.
  • Coordinate system resources: Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device activity, preserving responsiveness within latency, memory, battery, and thermal constraints.
  • Advance performance and power management: Develop and validate execution strategies that adapt to workload needs, available resources, and changing device conditions.
  • Debug across the stack: Use tracing, profiling, and structured debugging to investigate correctness, concurrency, performance, and reliability issues across models, inference runtimes, and OS components.
  • Measure and validate improvements: Build diagnostic tools, instrumentation, representative device workloads, and automated tests to demonstrate repeatable performance and energy gains on physical devices, catch regressions, and validate sustained use.
  • Bring capabilities to production: Collaborate with research, hardware, firmware, platform, and product engineering teams to turn emerging model capabilities into maintainable systems and reliable shipped features.


Minimum Qualifications
  • Substantial hands-on experience designing, developing, and debugging operating system components, system services, or performance-critical platform software.
  • Proficiency in C++ for systems development, including concurrent programming, memory ownership, and resource lifetime management.
  • Hands-on experience integrating or optimizing inference runtimes or machine learning workloads in resource-constrained environments.
  • Strong understanding of scheduling, memory management, and how workloads compete for shared system resources.
  • Experience diagnosing complex system behavior and delivering performance or power improvements supported by repeatable measurements.
  • Ability to work across disciplines, translate research and product needs into system requirements, and explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly.


You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have delivered end-to-end on-device inference in shipped products, from model adaptation and runtime integration through OS support and production debugging.
  • Have adapted models for deployment through quantization, compression, or related techniques, balancing quality, execution cost, and memory requirements.
  • Have optimized inference across CPUs, GPUs, or neural accelerators, accounting for data movement, synchronization, and execution placement.
  • Are proficient in Rust for systems programming.
  • Take ownership of complete solutions and follow problems across model, runtime, and operating system boundaries.
  • Challenge assumptions, develop new approaches when existing techniques fall short, and use experiments and measurements to guide decisions.
  • Work constructively across disciplines and make careful tradeoffs among model quality, performance, power, reliability, security, and maintainability.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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