Networking Operating System Firmware Engineer

The role

You will build and maintain custom NOS images from scratch to bootstrap and scale the switching layer of AI supercomputers. This involves working across the Linux kernel, switch ASIC SDKs, platform drivers, and orchestration layers.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain custom NOS images for large-scale AI fabrics.
• Integrate, build and configure Linux kernel components, device drivers, switch ASIC SDKs, and SAI layers.
• Bring up new switch platforms including thermal, fan, power, and transceiver management.
• Extend and customize NOS services for routing, telemetry, and control-plane state.
• Implement and debug route, neighbor, next-hop, and ECMP programming flows.
• Build software mechanisms for hardware programming acknowledgement.
• Work with hardware teams to validate ASIC configurations and performance baselines.
• Evaluate switch silicon SDK releases and validate platform requirements with vendors.
• Debug complex issues spanning kernel drivers, NOS services, and hardware signals.
• Integrate switches into fleet-wide monitoring and automated lifecycle workflows.

Required qualifications

• Experience working with SONiC or comparable NOS stacks such as FBOSS, Cumulus Linux, Arista EOS, or Junos PFE-level integration.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals in C/C++, Python, Go or Rust.
• Experience with Linux kernel internals, network device drivers, platform drivers, hwmon, I2C/SMBus, CPLDs, or board-level platform software.
• Experience integrating or debugging Broadcom, Marvell, NVIDIA, Intel, or comparable switch ASIC SDKs and SAI implementations.
• Understanding of L2/L3 forwarding, ECMP, RoCE, BGP, QoS, PFC, buffer tuning, and telemetry.
• Experience with platform bring-up and board-level debugging.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, distributed config and state management, and large-scale automation.
• Ability to independently drive ambiguous NOS or platform feature development.

Nice to have

• Experience with OpenConfig gNMI interfaces, YANG data models, or structured telemetry.
• Familiarity with Rust or Go.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance to new employees

Before you apply

• Candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements to comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations.
• Background checks for applicants will be administered.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for advanced AI workloads.