AI Accelerator Runtime Engineer (Low-Level Systems)

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 266,000 - 445,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a highly technical engineer to build the low-level device runtime for its custom AI accelerator and to optimize kernel launches, memory management, and synchronization across hardware and software boundaries.

You will work with compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, and silicon teams, using cycle-accurate simulators to validate behavior before silicon becomes available and after deployment to ensure performance and correctness.

Qualifications

• Strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.
• Built runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.
• Understand concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement the low-level device runtime for OpenAI custom silicon.
• Build kernel-launch scheduling, command submission, queueing, dependency tracking, and completion handling.
• Manage device memory spaces, allocation, virtual-to-physical mappings, data movement, and lifetime across concurrent workloads.
• Implement synchronization primitives, events, barriers, streams, and ordering guarantees that are correct and efficient.
• Define clean interfaces between the runtime, drivers, firmware, compiler-generated code, kernels, and higher-level execution systems.
• Use event-based, cycle-accurate simulators to develop, validate, debug, and performance-tune runtime behavior before and after silicon availability.
• Diagnose concurrency, memory-ordering, deadlock, race, correctness, and performance issues across software and hardware boundaries.
• Build tests, tracing, profiling, observability, and reproducible workloads for runtime correctness and performance.
• Partner with architecture and silicon teams to turn workload and simulator insights into hardware-software interface improvements.

Skills

Low-level systems

C/C++

Rust

Concurrency

Tools

Event-based simulators

Job description

OpenAI is seeking a highly technical engineer to build the low-level device runtime for its custom AI accelerator and to optimize kernel launches, memory management, and synchronization across hardware and software boundaries.

You will work with compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, and silicon teams, using cycle-accurate simulators to validate behavior before silicon becomes available and after deployment to ensure performance and correctness.