Firmware Engineer, Robotics at OpenAI · LumiJobs

Responsibilities

As a Firmware Engineer, 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.
Our embedded stack uses a lot of Rust. Extensive experience in the language is a big help!
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.

Firmware Engineer, Robotics

Responsibilities

Qualification

Required

Preferred

Company

OpenAI

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