OpenAI
More roles at OpenAISoftware Engineer, AI for Chip Design
Part remote, part office, you need to live within commuting distance of a named location.
Hybrid · San Francisco
Employer listed it 7 weeks ago · Added 2 weeks ago
Been open since 7 weeks ago. Long-running listings are sometimes left up after the role is filled.
Salary
$266k to $468k per year
Location
Hybrid · San Francisco
Timezone
Not stated
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Mid
Category
Software
Published by the employer
What the advert says
Quoted word for word from the employer's advert. Where it says nothing, we say so.
- Working hours
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Where you can work from
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…
- Contract
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Experience asked for
- Not mentioned in the advert
- Pay
- Not mentioned in the advert
Remote flexibility
Hybrid
This role is only partly remote, the employer expects time in the office around San Francisco, Hybrid, so you need to live within commuting distance.
What the employer says
- Source listing states candidate location: "San Francisco, Hybrid"
- Listing mentions "Hybrid"
What Nomaders makes of it
- Not suitable if you plan to move between countries
The quotes above are the employer's own words; the reading is ours. Always check the original listing and employment terms before working from another country.
Before you apply
Experience: employer states
Written as a requirement
- “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.”
Questions worth asking: Nomaders interpretation
- This role involves office time, but the advert does not say how often. Ask how many days a week are expected on site.
- The advert does not say whether this is employment or a contractor arrangement. Ask, as it affects tax and benefits.
Produced automatically from this advert's text; not reviewed by a person. The employer's own page is the final word.
About the role
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.
Requirements
The employer hasn't listed requirements separately, they're described in the role summary above and on the original listing.
Benefits
No benefits package published with this listing. Ask about it at first interview.
How to apply
- 1Check the flexibility label above, hybrid, matches where you plan to live and work.
- 2Tailor your CV to the role at OpenAI, mentioning your remote working experience.
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 17d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
$266k to $468k per year · You'll be taken to the employer's careers page.