Software Engineer - Sensing, Consumer Devices

About the Team

Consumer Devices Research prototypes the future of computing: we explore new modalities, interaction patterns, and system behaviors, then do the engineering required to make those ideas real in rigorous prototypes. The Neosensing team sits at the intersection of sensing, edge algorithms, and systems engineering. We build the end-to-end software that turns new signals into dependable capabilities—collection tooling and protocols, algorithm integration and evaluation hooks, and on-device loops that stay stable under real-world variability. We care deeply about software quality and iteration speed: clean interfaces, debuggability, observability, and performance under tight device constraints.

About the Role

As a Software Engineer on Consumer Devices Research, you’ll sit at the boundary between algorithm development and shippable systems. You’ll work closely with algorithm engineers to translate prototypes into clean interfaces, reliable pipelines, and efficient on-device implementations—with strong attention to performance, observability, and real-world failure modes.

This is a software role first: we’re looking for someone who loves writing great code every day, takes pride in engineering craft, and is comfortable going deep enough into the algorithmic details to make the system work end-to-end.

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:

• Build and ship production software for sensing algorithms, translating algorithm prototypes into reliable end-to-end systems.

• Implement and own key parts of the Python shipping pipeline (integration surfaces, evaluation hooks, and quality/performance guardrails).

• Develop embedded/on-device software in an RTOS environment (e.g., Zephyr) and deploy models to device runtimes and hardware accelerators.

• Optimize real-time on-device perception loops (e.g., detection/tracking-style pipelines) for stability, latency, power, and memory constraints.

• Create data collection + instrumentation tooling to bring up new sensing modalities and accelerate iteration from prototype → dataset → model → device.

• Partner cross-functionally (algorithms, human data, firmware/hardware) to debug, profile, and harden systems against real-world variability.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Love writing great software and want your work to sit close to novel sensing and edge algorithms.

• Understand algorithm behavior well enough to integrate, debug, and evaluate it—even if you’re not the primary model inventor.

• Have shipped production Python systems and care about clean interfaces, tests, and long-term maintainability.

• Enjoy embedded/on-device work and can debug across hardware, firmware, and higher-level application layers.

• Care about performance engineering and know how to profile and optimize under tight device constraints.

• Take ownership end-to-end and thrive in ambiguous, fast-moving, zero-to-one environments.

Bonus:

• Zephyr (or similar RTOS) experience.

• On-device ML deployment (NPU/GPU/DSP) and accelerator-aware profiling/optimization.

• Background in multimodal sensing, sensor fusion, or on-device perception.

• Experience building data collection systems and human-in-the-loop workflows (protocols, QA, metadata)

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.

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