PCB Layout Engineer and Librarian

About Team

Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems 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 physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives.

About Role

An engineer in this role will work with a very small team of electrical design engineers to turn schematics and mechanical constraints into finished circuit board designs and fabrication packages that can be manufactured. They will also structure, populate, and maintain the component libraries upon which those designs will be based. The team uses the KiCad suite of EDA tools, though familiarity with that suite can be learned on the job.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 4 days a week.

In this role you will:

• Design and implement workflows for shared component libraries

  • Evolve strategies for backing stores and access

  • Build and maintain automation tools to accelerate library creation, maintenance, and quality control

  • Create schematic symbols, footprints, and 3D models for new library components

• Make boards and strengthen the associated institutional machinery

  • Work with electrical and mechanical engineers to trade off design requirements

  • Place and route boards

  • Handle DFM feedback from board vendors to get to build readiness

  • Create rulesets and stackup templates to accelerate future designs

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a background in PCB design

• Are interested and willing to try new tools and technologies to accelerate your work

• Have an unflappable commitment to principled organization and consistent quality

• Are willing to tell your designers that they’re prioritizing badly

• Don’t feel strong attachment to any particular artifact

What success looks like:

• You’ve built a consistent and high-quality library that is easy to maintain

• Electrical design engineers are spending a majority of their time making schematics

• You’ve grown design-reuse across the organization

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.

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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.

Compensation Range: $216K - $225K