As of Sept. 21, 2026, OpenAI's careers pages advertised a Machine Learning Engineer, Distributed Data Systems - Robotics role in San Francisco with a base salary of $380K to $500K plus equity, the highest pay among the listed robotics roles. The wider set of robotics openings describes data collection labs, robot workstations that gather data, and large systems for training AI on more than one kind of data. The listings give a public view of how OpenAI is building its robotics work: through hiring for robot data, not through a product announcement.
OpenAI has not announced the hiring in a company blog or news post. Its public job board listed about 26 core robotics openings. The roles include engineers to expand robot data collection and testing programs, staff to keep robot workstations running for ongoing data gathering, and a manager to run day-to-day work inside data collection facilities.
The listed salaries are advertised ranges, not final offers. OpenAI's pages post Robotics Software Engineer at $255K to $325K, Field Engineer at $225K to $318K and Operations Program Manager - Robotics Data Acquisition at $177K to $251K. Firmware Engineer, Robotics is listed at $380K to $445K, Control Systems Software Engineer, Robotics at $380K to $460K, and Inference Engineer, Robotics at a flat $380K (inference means running a trained model, as opposed to training it), each with equity. Other openings cover actuator design, circuit-board layout, prototyping lab work, motors and manufacturing, commercial legal work, and environment, health and safety, a mix that points to hardware work in-house.
A Sept. 18 news report said OpenAI had 27 robotics jobs on its careers page, up from 11 in May, with advertised base salaries from $177,000 to $500,000 before equity, and that OpenAI declined to comment. Cornell professor Guy Hoffman, who reviewed the postings for that report, said OpenAI appears to be assembling a "custom robot design team." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a podcast interview that the company will "definitely do a humanoid" and other robot forms. A Sept. 20 news report described OpenAI's move into physical AI, meaning AI that senses and acts in the real world through machines such as robots and self-driving cars, as a data story more than a hiring one. It pointed to growing teleoperation in San Francisco, with people steering robots remotely, and a warehouse lease in Richmond, details that do not appear on OpenAI's careers pages.
It is not yet clear how the number of listings will change from week to week (27 in the Sept. 18 report against about 26 on OpenAI's job board), whether OpenAI will confirm the reported sites, or when a product or new robot design might follow the hiring.