OpenAI Field Engineer at OpenAI Robotics responsible for maintaining robotic workcells and diagnosing hardware and software failures. Builds tools and documentation to improve operational reliability.
Responsibilities
OpenAI Robotics depends on high-quality real-world robot data from a large, live operational environment. That environment has many deployed workcells, changing configurations, and little tolerance for downtime.
We are seeking a Field Engineer to help keep that environment running well. You will own the day-to-day technical health of robotic workcells used in ongoing data acquisition operations, diagnose and resolve failures across hardware and software, and build the practical tools, documentation, and support workflows that make operators and technicians more effective. The work is close to the floor, close to the failure modes, and close to the research impact. This role sits at the intersection of software, robotics hardware, and live operations. The best people in it are practical, technically sharp, calm under pressure, and motivated by making real systems work reliably at scale.
This role will be based in San Francisco, CA 5 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
Serve as an engineering owner for keeping a fleet of robotic workcells online in daily operation.
Diagnose, fix, mitigate, or escalate issues spanning mechanics, electronics, controls, software interfaces, logs, and configuration.
Partner closely with technicians, operators, and engineering teams to improve scalable fleet support processes.
Build or spec lightweight hardware and software tools that improve monitoring, diagnostics, recovery, and handoffs.
Create documentation, SOPs, and diagnostic playbooks that turn engineering insight into repeatable floor practice.
Bring up and support prototype systems, then help transition them into scalable operations as they mature.
Manage, triage, and respond to inbound tickets while maintaining clear issue history, ownership, and escalation paths.
Write lightweight analysis scripts to identify fleet trends, recurring failures, and opportunities to improve reliability.
Provide concise failure reports and operational feedback that help engineering teams improve system design.
Qualification
Familiarity with robot middlewareExperience with fleet operationsAbility to use CAD for small componentsWe are an equal opportunity employerFor additional information
Required
5+ years experience supporting electromechanical, robotic, automation, or human-in-the-loop systems
Preferred
Familiarity with robot middleware, motion-control stacks, Linux-based systems, service debugging, or real-time debugging tools.
Experience with fleet operations, internal tools, observability, support platforms, workflow automation, or incident response.
Ability to use CAD for small components, fixtures, brackets, or light modifications to existing assemblies.
Experience improving operational throughput and maintainability, not just fixing isolated failures.
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.
