About the company
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.
Conditions
- This role will be based in San Francisco, CA 5 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
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.