OpenAI is offering engineers up to $500,000 in salary as it pushes into robotics
OpenAI is offering robotics engineers up to $500,000 a year. Its job listings offer clues about the company's robot ambitions.
OpenAI Offers Engineers Up to $500,000 in Salary as It Pushes into Robotics
OpenAI is aggressively expanding its robotics capabilities, as evident from a series of job postings that provide insight into the company’s ambitious plans. The listings reveal that OpenAI is hiring engineers to design and build hardware, collect and process data to train robots, and test them, going beyond just developing software to control robots.
Robotics Team Expansion
The company is seeking actuator design engineers to build motors and mechanisms that move a robot’s joints, as well as software, firmware, and machine‑learning engineers. In addition, OpenAI is looking for a lab technician to help develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems, and a lawyer dedicated to the robotics team. Another posting calls for a manager to oversee OpenAI’s “data collection facilities,” a critical bottleneck in the industry because robots require real‑world interaction data that cannot be scraped from the internet.
High‑paying Job Opening
The most lucrative vacancy is for a machine‑learning engineer focused on distributed data systems that handle the massive flow of robotics training data across computers. That role lists a base salary of up to $500,000. Cornell professor Guy Hoffman, who leads the Human‑Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab, examined all 27 postings and said OpenAI appears to be assembling a “custom robot design team.” The descriptions emphasize “unlocking general‑purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI‑level intelligence” while exploring “a broad range of robotics form factors.”
Long‑term Robotics Ambitions
One posting states the long‑term vision is “everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently been more explicit about these goals. On the Sources podcast earlier this month, Altman told investor Alex Heath, “We will definitely do a humanoid. We will do other form factors as well.” The robotics effort is led by Aditya Ramesh, a longtime researcher known for creating DALL·E and later working on Sora, the company’s AI video generator, as well as world‑simulation models that mimic physical reality.
Return to Robotics
OpenAI previously experimented with robotics before shutting down a project that produced a robotic hand capable of solving a Rubik’s Cube in 2020. The renewed focus arrives as billions of dollars pour into “physical AI,” the term for embedding increasingly capable AI models into machines that act in the real world. Business Insider reported earlier this year that OpenAI was teaching a robotic arm to perform household tasks as part of its humanoid effort.
Competition in Robotics
If OpenAI succeeds in building its own humanoid, it will compete directly with heavily funded Silicon Valley rivals such as Tesla, which is developing the Optimus humanoid, and Figure AI. OpenAI’s venture arm, OpenAI Startup Fund, has invested in Figure and previously partnered with the company on robot AI models. Hoffman noted that references to laser range finders and batteries “vaguely imply” an untethered mobile robot, though the postings do not specify whether the platform would move on wheels or legs.
Source: businessinsider.com · 2026-09-18