OpenAI
Harness Engineer
San Francisco · Contract
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 5 days ago
RoboticsMechanical DesignElectrical EngineeringResearch
About the role
- This role is based in San Francisco, CA.
- This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
- Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings.
Responsibilities
- Build and validate prototypes through hands-on bring-up, debugging, characterization, and iterative refinement.
- Develop test methodologies and characterization infrastructure for wire harness performance, reliability, durability, and failure analysis.
- Analyze test data to identify limitations, failure modes, and opportunities for design improvement.
- Collaborate with manufacturing and supplier partners to transition designs from prototype to scalable production-ready assemblies.
- Contribute to wire harness sourcing strategy, vendor qualification, prototype builds, and supply-chain development.
- Document designs, interfaces, validation results, and engineering decisions to support long-term maintainability and production readiness.
- Are highly hands-on and enjoy building, debugging, instrumenting, and testing hardware directly.
- Have a strong sense of ownership and proactively drive cross-functional alignment to unblock progress.
- Communicate clearly across disciplines and can collaborate effectively with research, controls, manufacturing, and operations teams.
Requirements
- Care deeply about engineering rigor while maintaining the ability to iterate quickly.
Nice to have
- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Mechatronics, or a related field.
- Strong understanding of connector types across all size ranges and wire types.
- Proficiency with CAD and PLM tools, such as NX and Teamcenter, or equivalent systems.
- Experience scaling hardware systems from prototype through EVT/DVT/PVT and into production is a plus.
- We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products.
- For additional information, please see OpenAI's Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
- return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment
- In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
Benefits
- Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom wire harnesses and/or flexible printed circuits (FPC).
- Enjoy operating at both subsystem and system levels, balancing wire harness and/or flexible printed circuit design with overall robot integration needs.
Company info
- 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.
This listing is sourced directly from OpenAI's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.