OpenAI’s Top-Paying Robotics Job, at Up to $500,000, Is About Data, Not Hardware

The best-paid robotics job OpenAI is advertising doesn’t involve building a robot. A machine learning engineer role focused on the distributed data systems behind robotics training runs lists a base salary of $380,000 to $500,000, plus equity, The Next Web reported.

Business Insider counted 27 robotics openings on OpenAI’s careers page, up from 11 in May, with advertised base pay from $177,000 to $500,000 before equity. (The Next Web counted 21 open roles, all in San Francisco.) The listings span hardware, software, data collection and prototyping. OpenAI is hiring actuator design engineers, who build the motors that move a robot’s joints, along with firmware and machine learning engineers, a lab technician to “develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems,” and a lawyer dedicated to the robotics team.

Pay drops off fast below the top role

A robotics software engineer with five years of experience, Rust or C++ fluency and an industrial automation background can earn $255,000 to $325,000, and an inference engineer role carries a fixed $380,000, according to The Next Web. Roles that build the machines themselves, including actuator designer, firmware engineer, PCB layout engineer and prototyping technician, have no posted ranges.

Those figures fit OpenAI’s existing pay scale. Federal visa filings reviewed earlier this year showed research scientists earning up to $685,000 in base pay and hardware engineers up to $555,000.

Why data gets the biggest check

Another posting would oversee OpenAI’s “data collection facilities.” Language models could train on text already on the internet, but robots need examples of how people and machines interact with the physical world, and robotics companies often have to generate that data themselves or buy it. OpenAI shut down its earlier robotics team in 2021; co-founder Wojciech Zaremba has said the approach lacked key pieces, especially enough data. The team restarted in 2024.

Guy Hoffman, a Cornell professor who leads the university’s Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab, reviewed the postings for Business Insider and said OpenAI appears to be assembling a “custom robot design team.” One listing says the team is exploring “a broad range of robotics form factors.”

Sam Altman has been direct about where that leads. “We will definitely do a humanoid,” he told investor Alex Heath on the Sources podcast. “We will do other form factors as well.” That would put OpenAI up against Tesla’s Optimus and Figure AI, a company the OpenAI Startup Fund has invested in.