Lab Operations Engineer, Systems Integration | Consumer Devices

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. The Systems Integration team is critical in this mission, turning complex hardware-software development into reliable product signals. Lab Operations is the physical backbone of that work: we build and maintain the device fleets, test environments, and hardware-in-the-loop labs that let teams test repeatably, understand failures, and ship with confidence. About the Role As a Lab Operations Manager, Systems Integration, you will own the day-to-day operation of a large-scale consumer device test lab. This is a hands-on operations leadership role: you’ll keep device fleets, test rigs, lab infrastructure, inventory, provisioning, maintenance, and logistics running smoothly so engineers and QA technicians have reliable environments for validation and release testing. We’re looking for someone who is highly organized, technically hands-on, comfortable with consumer electronics and lab equipment, and experienced operating complex physical test environments at scale. Because this is a new category of devices, you’ll have the opportunity to build the lab operating model early—shaping the systems, standards, and workflows that support products from prototype through launch. In this role, you will: - Own device fleet and inventory: Manage configuration, deployment, tracking, lifecycle, and accurate asset records for a large fleet of consumer devices and test equipment; coordinate receiving, storage, checkout, shipping, transfers, spares, and secure disposal. - Operate and maintain the lab: Keep racks, benches, test rigs, cabling, power, networking, peripherals, and shared equipment reliable and organized; diagnose issues and coordinate repairs, replacements, and preventive maintenance. - Prepare devices for testing: Flash, provision, reset, configure, label, and assign devices to test environments. - Support testing and diagnostics: Partner with engineering and QA on large-scale test automation setups, failure reproduction, diagnostics collection, log capture, and environment resets. - Plan lab readiness and capacity: Track fleet health, rig availability, utilization, and upcoming test needs; identify constraints before they block testing. - Partner across teams: Work with hardware, systems, QA, reliability, IT, and infrastructure teams to keep the lab ready for development and release activities. Minimum Qualifications - Proven track-record of operating or supporting a hardware, electronics, reliability, manufacturing, or QA test lab. - Hands-on experience managing fleets of consumer electronics, embedded devices, prototypes, or connected hardware. - Comfortable setting up, configuring, troubleshooting, and maintaining devices, test rigs, networking, power systems, and peripherals across USB, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, power, and device connectivity. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have strong organizational skills and can manage competing requests while keeping inventory, asset tracking, maintenance records, lab logistics, and shared spaces documented and operational. - Are comfortable following technical procedures for provisioning, firmware installation, resets, diagnostics collection, and test setup. - Communicate clearly with engineers, QA teams, vendors, and technicians and are comfortable escalating issues with concise supporting information. - Enjoy improving the reliability, scalability, and efficiency of physical lab operations. - Basic CAD familiarity is a plus. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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. 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