Field Engineer
OpenAI · San Francisco, United States · 1mo ago
About the Team
The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.
About the Role
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.
In this role, you will:
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.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 5+ years of experience supporting electromechanical, robotic, automation, or human-in-the-loop systems in production, R&D, lab, field, or operational environments.
Can independently troubleshoot messy real-world failures under time pressure, where symptoms and root causes are often different.
Are comfortable working across mechanical, electrical, controls, and software boundaries, including logs, configurations, and basic software debugging.
Have strong organizational habits around tickets, documentation, shift-to-shift communication, and follow-through.
Communicate clearly with operators, technicians, shift managers, and engineers, especially when uptime and clarity matter.
Love getting hands-on with physical systems and running complex issues to ground without adding unnecessary complexity.
Hold a Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, Robotics, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Preferred qualifications
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.
Experience troubleshooting complicated electrical assemblies, wire harnesses, instrumentation, or hardware-software integration issues.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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