Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design
AI for Chip Design - San Francisco
About the Team
OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering.
Our goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings researchance at the center.
About the Role
We're hiring a Software Engineer to build the research infrastructure and tooling that help OpenAI models design silicon. You'll turn chip-design workflows into reliable environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and make it easier for researchers to run experiments and iterate on new ideas.
You'll move between software engineering, tool integration, and open research problems. We value strong coding fundamentals, clear technical judgment, and independent execution. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team's hardware specialists.
In this role, you will:
Build and maintain infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and long-running experiments.
Integrate electronic design automation (EDA) tools into workflows for RTL generation, verification, and physical design optimization.
Improve experiment reliabilityance; debug failures across tools, services, and infrastructure.
Develop tooling and model harnesses that let researchers test ideas quickly and measure correctness and powerance, and area (PPA).
Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn successful experiments into reusable systems and training workflows.
Own ambiguous projects end to end, communicate progress, and use results to guide the next iteration.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience designing, implementing, and debugging reliable systems.
Can work across a stack, investigate unfamiliar failures, and make practical tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and maintainability.
Have independently delivered substantial software projects and can explain your technical decisions and their impact.
Are comfortable working with researchers on evolving requirements and turning open-ended problems into working software.
Are interested in learning how reinforcement learning and chip-design tools fit together.
Care about developing safe, beneficial AI.
Nice to have:
Experience with research infrastructure, distributed systems, experiment orchestration, or ML tooling.
Familiarity with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, or training workflows.
Experience with Python, containerized tools, and reproducible development environments.
Experience with RTLal verification, or chip-design automation.
To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.
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 the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
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
$266K – $468K + Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.