Release Engineer | Consumer Devices
DevOps Engineer · Senior · Full Time
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Role
What you'll do.
The Release Engineer role at OpenAI's Consumer Devices team focuses on designing, building, and operating release infrastructure for reliable, secure, and traceable software delivery across complex multi-component systems including bootloaders, firmware, operating systems, and cloud services. You'll partner with embedded, cloud, and QA teams to enable fast, verifiable, and production-ready builds while managing CI/CD pipelines, OTA deployment strategies, security hardening, and fleet telemetry at scale. This position requires expertise in build automation, embedded systems delivery, reproducible toolchains, and metrics-driven continuous improvement for hardware-software integration.
Responsibilities
- Design and Operate Multi-Component CI/CD Pipelines: Architect and maintain CI/CD infrastructure for complex multi-component builds including bootloaders, firmware, OS images, backend services, and companion applications. Implement hermetic toolchains that ensure reproducible builds and consistent artifact generation across the entire software delivery pipeline, enabling reliable automation from development through production deployment.
- Define Release Versioning and Branching Strategies: Establish and automate versioning schemes, branching strategies, and promotion workflows that provide clear traceability and safety gates throughout the release process. Automate changelog generation, artifact retention policies, and promotion criteria to reduce manual overhead and ensure consistent release practices across all components.
- Integrate and Validate Test Results Across All Levels: Aggregate unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results into unified quality gates. Implement automated failure quarantine mechanisms, auto-bisection capabilities for failure root cause analysis, and promotion blocking for unsafe builds, ensuring only verified code reaches production.
- Manage Secure OTA Update Deployment Flows: Build and operate A/B over-the-air update mechanisms with verity verification and comprehensive health checks. Implement staged rollout and canary deployment strategies with automated safe rollback and roll-forward capabilities, minimizing deployment risk while maximizing reliability for fleet updates.
- Implement Security and Supply Chain Controls: Deploy code signing infrastructure for binaries and firmware, generate Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs), execute vulnerability scanning across the artifact pipeline, and attach build attestations and provenance metadata. Manage cryptographic key infrastructure and supply-chain hardening practices to meet security and compliance requirements.
- Monitor and Optimize Release Infrastructure Health: Create comprehensive dashboards and alerting systems tracking build health metrics, promotion latency, failure rates, and fleet update telemetry. Drive metrics-driven continuous improvement initiatives to identify bottlenecks, reduce mean time to recovery, and enhance overall system reliability and performance.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Build System Architecture and CI/CD Infrastructure
Proven experience designing, building, and operating production CI/CD pipelines for complex multi-component systems. Deep understanding of build orchestration, artifact management, pipeline orchestration, and infrastructure-as-code practices essential for release automation at scale.
Consumer Devices, Embedded Systems, or Robotics Delivery
Hands-on experience shipping consumer hardware or embedded products with coordinated firmware and software releases. Familiarity with bootloader systems, firmware update mechanisms, and the unique challenges of delivering coordinated updates across heterogeneous hardware platforms.
Linux System Administration and Kernel Fundamentals
Strong Linux user-space fundamentals including kernel interfaces, system calls, file systems, and process management. Experience managing Linux-based build environments, container systems, and the interaction between hardware bootloaders and OS kernel components.
Advanced Scripting and Automation
Proficiency in Python, Bash, or similar scripting languages for automation framework development. Ability to write maintainable, well-tested infrastructure code that handles complex workflow orchestration, error handling, and operational reliability.
CI/CD Platform Expertise
Production experience with GitHub Actions, Buildkite, Jenkins, or equivalent CI/CD platforms. Understanding of distributed build systems, workflow customization, secret management, and integration with artifact repositories and deployment systems.
Reproducible Build Systems and Toolchains
Experience implementing and maintaining hermetic, reproducible build toolchains that produce bit-identical artifacts. Knowledge of Nix, Bazel, or similar tools that enforce build hermeticity and enable verifiable supply chain practices.
Vendor BSP and Toolchain Management
Experience managing Board Support Packages (BSPs), vendor-provided toolchains, and cross-compilation environments. Ability to integrate third-party components while maintaining reproducibility and applying security patches without compromising build integrity.
OTA Update Systems and Staged Deployments
Delivered secure over-the-air update systems with staged rollout capabilities at production scale. Experience implementing differential updates, delta compression, rollback mechanisms, and health checks that minimize deployment risk and downtime.
Cryptography, Key Management, and Supply Chain Security
Understanding of asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, digital signatures, and key management infrastructure. Familiarity with code signing, attestation verification, SBOM generation, and supply-chain security practices including vulnerability scanning and compliance requirements.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or Electrical Engineering
Formal technical education providing foundational knowledge in computer systems, algorithms, and software engineering principles. Equivalent professional experience with demonstrated systems-level expertise may substitute for formal degree requirements.
Experience
Release and Build Infrastructure Leadership
Demonstrated ability to design, implement, and operate release systems from greenfield concept through production deployment. Experience leading architectural decisions and driving system improvements that scale with organizational growth and product complexity.
Multi-Team Collaboration in Complex Environments
Proven ability to collaborate effectively with embedded systems teams, cloud infrastructure teams, QA organizations, and product managers. Strong communication skills for explaining release automation concepts across technical and non-technical audiences.
Metrics-Driven Continuous Improvement
Track record of establishing meaningful metrics for release systems, identifying performance bottlenecks, and implementing data-driven improvements. Experience demonstrating business impact through reduced release latency, improved failure detection, and increased deployment safety.
On-Call Operations and Incident Response
Experience owning production systems with on-call responsibilities. Ability to troubleshoot complex system failures, implement permanent solutions, and establish runbooks that enable effective incident response and knowledge sharing.
Skills
Required
Python
Production-level proficiency in Python for writing infrastructure automation, build scripts, and operational tools. Experience with testing frameworks, dependency management, and creating maintainable code at scale.
Bash/Shell Scripting
Advanced shell scripting capabilities for automating build processes, system administration tasks, and cross-platform deployment workflows. Comfortable with POSIX compatibility, signal handling, and error management in shell environments.
Git and Version Control
Expert-level Git proficiency including branching strategies, merge workflows, tag management, and integration with CI/CD systems. Understanding of monorepo and multi-repo architectures and their impact on release processes.
GitHub Actions or Buildkite
Production experience configuring, maintaining, and scaling GitHub Actions or Buildkite CI/CD platforms. Understanding of workflow syntax, secret management, self-hosted runner deployment, and platform-specific optimization techniques.
Artifact Repository Management
Hands-on experience with artifact registries such as Artifactory, Nexus, or OCI-compliant registries. Understanding of artifact storage strategies, retention policies, security scanning integration, and efficient artifact promotion workflows.
Linux System Administration
Deep Linux user-space fundamentals including file systems, permissions, process management, networking, and kernel module interaction. Experience administering production Linux systems and troubleshooting system-level issues.
Container Technologies
Proficiency with Docker and container orchestration concepts for hermetic build environments. Understanding of container image creation, layer optimization, multi-stage builds, and container registry integration.
Infrastructure as Code
Experience defining infrastructure using code-driven approaches such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Ansible. Ability to version control infrastructure definitions and implement reproducible deployment procedures.
Code Signing and Cryptography
Practical understanding of digital signatures, certificate management, and code signing workflows. Experience implementing signing infrastructure that maintains security while enabling efficient release processes.
Monitoring and Observability
Experience designing dashboards and alerts using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalent platforms. Ability to translate business requirements into meaningful metrics and implement alerting strategies that drive operational excellence.
Preferred
Bazel or Nix Build Systems
Nice to haveExperience with advanced build systems that enforce reproducibility and hermeticity. Understanding of their role in enabling verifiable supply chains and bit-identical builds across different environments.
Bootloader and Firmware Development Knowledge
Nice to haveFamiliarity with bootloader concepts, firmware update mechanisms, and low-level system initialization. Understanding of device tree formats, hardware enablement, and the bootloader-to-kernel handoff process.
OTA Update Frameworks
Nice to haveExperience with OTA update systems such as OSTree, SWUpdate, or custom OTA infrastructure. Knowledge of delta encoding, differential updates, and strategies for minimizing bandwidth during fleet-wide deployments.
Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing
Nice to haveExperience designing and implementing hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test infrastructure. Understanding of embedded systems testing challenges and integration of hardware testing into CI/CD pipelines.
Vulnerability Scanning and Supply Chain Security
Nice to haveExperience with SBOM generation tools, vulnerability scanning solutions, and supply chain security practices. Familiarity with standards like SLSA and frameworks for improving software provenance and integrity.
Cross-Compilation and Embedded Toolchains
Nice to haveExperience managing cross-compilation environments for ARM, x86, or RISC-V architectures. Understanding of vendor-provided toolchains, BSP customization, and maintaining toolchain reproducibility across builds.
DevOps and SRE Best Practices
Nice to haveFamiliarity with site reliability engineering principles, production readiness frameworks, and operational excellence practices. Understanding of blameless incident postmortems and continuous improvement culture.
Robotics or IoT Device Management
Nice to haveExperience shipping robotics or IoT products with complex firmware and software coordination requirements. Understanding of fleet management, telemetry collection, and safety-critical update procedures for deployed hardware.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·USD 293,000 – 325,000
Full posting
Original listing.
About the Team
The Release Engineer team is responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power software delivery—from CI/CD pipelines and artifact management to release automation and fleet telemetry. We ensure software across bootloaders, firmware, operating systems, and cloud services is built reproducibly, validated rigorously, and released safely at scale.
About the Role
As a Release Engineer, you’ll design, build, and operate release infrastructure that enables reliable, secure, and traceable software delivery across complex multi-component systems. You’ll partner closely with embedded, cloud, and QA teams to ensure that every build—from development to OTA deployment—is fast, verifiable, and production-ready.
We’re looking for engineers who take pride in automation, build reproducibility, and system reliability—and who enjoy building the connective tissue that allows hardware and software to ship together seamlessly.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Design and operate CI/CD pipelines for multi-component builds (bootloader, firmware, OS images, backend, companion apps) using hermetic toolchains.
Define versioning and branching strategies; automate promotions, changelogs, and artifact retention.
Integrate unit, integration, and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test results; quarantine flaky tests, auto-bisect failures, and block unsafe promotions.
Build A/B OTA update flows with verity and health checks; run staged rollouts and canaries; implement safe rollback and roll-forward strategies.
Implement code signing for binaries and firmware, generate SBOMs, run vulnerability scanning, and attach build attestations and provenance.
Manage dashboards and alerts for build health, promotion latency, failure rates, and fleet update telemetry.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have experience building and operating build and release systems for consumer devices, robotics, mobile, or embedded products.
Are proficient in scripting and automation languages such as Python or Bash.
Have strong Linux user-space fundamentals.
Have experience with GitHub Actions or Buildkite, artifact registries, and reproducible toolchains.
Have experience managing vendor BSPs and toolchains.
Have delivered secure OTA or image updates with staged rollouts at scale.
Are familiar with key management and supply-chain hardening.
Have a track record of metrics-driven improvement and continuous optimization.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
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