OpenAI is offering engineers up to $500,000 in salary as it pushes into robotics

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Bloomberg/Getty Images OpenAI has 27 robotics jobs listed on its careers page, up from 11 in May.

Base salaries for the roles reach as high as $500,000 a year.

The postings point to plans to build robot hardware, data systems, and AI in-house.

OpenAI is offering robotics engineers up to half a million dollars a year in base salaries as it builds out its robotics efforts.

The company has 27 robotics jobs listed on its careers page, up from 11 in May, spanning hardware, software, data collection, and prototyping, according to Business Insider's review.

Publicly advertised base salaries range from $177,000 to half a million dollars a year, before equity.

The listings offer a closer look at the range of robotics work OpenAI is doing itself.

The company is hiring people to design and build hardware, collect the data needed to train robots, and test them, not just develop software that controls them.

OpenAI is hiring actuator design engineers, who build the motors and mechanisms that move a robot's joints, alongside software, firmware, and machine-learning engineers.

It is looking for a lab technician to help "develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems," as well as a lawyer dedicated to the robotics team.

Another role would oversee OpenAI's "data collection facilities," pointing to one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks.

Unlike large language models, which could be trained on vast amounts of data already on the internet, robots need examples of how people and machines interact with the physical world.

Robotics companies often have to generate that data themselves or buy it from outside vendors.

The highest-paid opening is for a machine-learning engineer working on distributed data systems, infrastructure for processing and moving large amounts of robotics training data across computers.