OpenAI
Software Engineer, AI accelerator Runtime
Part remote, part office, you need to live within commuting distance of a named location.
Hybrid · San Francisco
Employer listed it 4 weeks ago · Added yesterday
Been open since 4 weeks ago, still checked daily, but it has been live a while.
Salary
$266,000–$445,000
Location
Hybrid · San Francisco
Work style
Async
Contract
Full-time
Experience
Mid
Category
Software
Published by the employer
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.
About the role
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
You will build the low-level device runtime that turns compiled programs into efficient, functional and performant execution on OpenAI’s custom AI accelerator. This software will schedule kernel launches, manage device memory and address spaces, coordinate synchronization, and expose reliable abstractions to higher-level runtimes and frameworks.
You will work at the boundary of software and hardware, partnering with compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, and silicon teams to define interfaces and validate behavior. You will also use and improve event-based, cycle-accurate simulation to develop runtime capabilities before silicon is available, diagnose performance and correctness issues, and guide hardware-software co-design.
In this role, you will:
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.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.
Have built runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.
Understand concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.
Understand memory management, address spaces, DMA, caching, coherency, and hardware-software interfaces.
Have hands-on experience with event-based, cycle-accurate simulators or closely related architectural and performance models.
Can reason quantitatively about scheduling, latency, throughput, utilization, contention, and resource tradeoffs.
Are skilled at debugging failures that span software abstractions, device interfaces, and hardware behavior.
Work effectively across compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, firmware, and silicon teams.
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 and working hours (Async).
- 3Apply directly on the employer's careers page using the button below. Nomaders never handles your application.
Found 1d ago. Last checked today. Always confirm the details on the original posting, salary and location can change after publication.
Listing sourced from Company boards.
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$266,000–$445,000 · You'll be taken to the employer's careers page.