RTL Design Engineer – Interconnect & Network Datapath

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking a senior RTL engineer to own microarchitecture and RTL for high-bandwidth on‑chip fabrics and off‑chip interfaces. You will drive design from requirements through tape-out, mentoring juniors and coordinating with external partners.

The role emphasizes deep Verilog/SystemVerilog expertise, production-quality RTL, and strong collaboration across architecture, verification, and physical design to meet performance, power, and area targets.

Qualifications

• Hands-on ownership of complex networking or packet-switched RTL blocks.
• Production-quality RTL developed in Verilog/SystemVerilog.
• Experience with on-chip/off-chip interfaces (AXI/PCIe/CXL/Ethernet) and NoC fabrics.

Responsibilities

• Own microarchitecture, RTL design, and delivery of packet-based interconnect components.
• Design routing, arbitration, flow control, QoS, and scheduling mechanisms.
• Develop on-chip/off-chip interfaces and protocol extensions for scale-up systems.
• Conduct RTL coding, simulation, and debugging across large-scale datapaths.
• Collaborate with architecture, verification, and physical design teams to optimize latency and bandwidth.
• Lead verification planning, coverage, and debug strategies for highly concurrent fabric behavior.
• Mentor junior engineers and coordinate with external partners on IP integration.
• Provide technical direction and drive alignment while remaining hands-on in RTL work.

Skills

RTL ownership

Verilog/SystemVerilog

Networking/NoC design

Architectural leadership

Tools

SystemVerilog

Verilog

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform.

About the Role

We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on RTL engineer with deep packet-networking and interconnect expertise to own critical on- and off-chip communication components for our custom AI accelerator platform.

You will drive the microarchitecture and RTL implementation of scalable on-chip fabrics connecting high-bandwidth compute, memory, and I/O subsystems, as well as purpose-built off-chip interfaces and protocols that enable custom computing at scale. The ideal candidate has recently owned production RTL for networking or packet-switched datapaths such as Ethernet switches, NICs, SmartNICs, network accelerators, RDMA/RoCE systems, NoCs, or custom scale-up/scale-out fabrics.

This is a senior engineering role with broad technical ownership and substantial direct RTL work. You will drive designs from requirements and performance analysis through microarchitecture, SystemVerilog implementation, verification closure, physical design convergence, silicon bring-up, and production readiness. You will also plan and oversee the work of junior engineers and help develop productive engineering relationships with external partners.

In this role, you will:

• Own the microarchitecture, RTL design, and delivery of major packet-based interconnect and networking components, including NoC fabrics, switches, routers, bridges, protocol adapters, arbiters, queues, schedulers, buffers, and traffic-management logic.

• Design mechanisms for routing, arbitration, ordering, flow control, congestion management, quality of service, packet scheduling, buffering, and performance monitoring.

• Develop on-chip and off-chip interfaces, protocol bridges, and custom networking protocols or protocol extensions for scale-up and scale-out systems.

• Perform substantial direct microarchitecture, SystemVerilog coding, simulation, and debug work.

• Collaborate with architecture and performance teams to analyze traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks, and optimize latency, bandwidth, fairness, and utilization under realistic workloads.

• Work with verification teams to develop coverage plans, assertions, stress scenarios, and debug strategies for highly concurrent packet and fabric behavior.

• Partner with physical design teams on floorplan-aware design, pipeline strategy, timing closure, power, area, and physical congestion.

• Collaborate with firmware, software, validation, and post-silicon teams through bring-up and production readiness.

• Drive third-party engagements involving networking, interface protocols, and silicon IP while maintaining design quality and execution accountability.

• Provide technical leadership through architecture and design reviews, documentation, mentoring, and reusable RTL methodologies.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• Extensive industry experience with recent, hands-on ownership of complex networking, packet-processing, or packet-switched interconnect RTL.

• Demonstrated networking expertise in one or more of the following: Ethernet switching, NIC/SmartNIC/DPU datapaths, network accelerators, RDMA/RoCE, InfiniBand, traffic management, or custom scale-up/scale-out transports.

• Deep expertise in Verilog/SystemVerilog and the development of clean, parameterized, production-quality RTL.

• A strong record of owning major RTL blocks or SoC subsystems from requirements and microarchitecture through tape-out and silicon bring-up.

• Experience designing queues, arbiters, schedulers, buffers, routing logic, virtual channels, credit-based flow control, congestion management, quality of service, ordering, or deadlock-avoidance mechanisms.

• Experience with relevant on-chip, chip-to-chip, or host interfaces such as AXI, CHI, CXL, PCIe, or Ethernet, alongside deeper networking or packet-datapath expertise.

• Experience designing custom networking protocols, protocol extensions, or hardware datapaths for large-scale RDMA/RoCE, HPC, or AI systems.

• Strong familiarity with RTL development and signoff flows, including lint, CDC/RDC, synthesis, formal verification, static timing analysis, power analysis, and design-for-test considerations.

• Experience collaborating with architecture, verification, physical design, firmware, performance, and post-silicon teams to deliver complex silicon.

• Strong judgment when balancing performance, power, area, schedule, verification risk, and physical implementation constraints.

• The ability to provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive alignment while remaining actively involved in RTL design and debugging.

• A passion for reducing complexity and improving engineering leverage through automation and pragmatic design.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing packet-switched interconnect or networking datapaths for AI accelerators, GPUs, CPUs, HPC systems, NICs/SmartNICs, switch ASICs, or large-scale datacenter silicon.

• Experience addressing virtualization, isolation, RAS, telemetry, security, or memory-consistency requirements within complex networking or interconnect subsystems.

• Experience with network or NoC performance modeling, traffic simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, or post-silicon traffic and performance analysis.

• Experience leading architecture or RTL delivery for first-generation networking or interconnect IP in rapidly evolving silicon programs.

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, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmitive Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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