Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 266,000 - 468,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco is seeking a Software Engineer to build the research infrastructure and tooling that helps OpenAI models design silicon.

You will work across reinforcement learning environments, RTL generation, verification, and tool integration to enable researchers to run experiments and iterate on new ideas.

We value strong coding fundamentals, practical tradeoffs, and the ability to learn chip-design concepts alongside hardware experts.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with designing, implementing and debugging reliable systems.
• Ability to work across a stack and make practical tradeoffs between speed and correctness.
• Experience delivering substantial software projects and explaining technical decisions.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and long-running experiments.
• Integrate EDA tools into RTL generation, verification, and physical design workflows.
• Improve experiment reliability, reproducibility, observability, and performance.
• Develop tooling and model harnesses for rapid testing of ideas with measurable metrics.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn experiments into reusable systems and training workflows.
• Own ambiguous projects end to end and communicate progress.

Skills

Software engineering fundamentals

Debugging reliable systems

Cross-stack collaboration

Independently deliver projects

Tools

Python

Containerized tools

Verilog/SystemVerilog

EDA tools

Job description

Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design | OpenAI

Careers

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 research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance 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 reliability, reproducibility, observability, and performance; debug failures across tools, services, and infrastructure.

• Develop tooling and model harnesses that let researchers test ideas quickly and measure correctness and power, performance, 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 RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA tools, formal 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, 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 Affiantive 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

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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