Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design

The role

You will build research infrastructure and tooling to help OpenAI models design silicon. This involves turning chip-design workflows into environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation.

What you will do

• 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 to test ideas and measure correctness and PPA.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn experiments into reusable systems and training workflows.
• Own ambiguous projects end to end.

Required qualifications

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with experience designing, implementing, and debugging reliable systems.
• Ability to work across a stack and investigate unfamiliar failures.
• Ability to make practical tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and maintainability.
• Experience independently delivering substantial software projects.
• Ability to explain technical decisions and their impact.
• Comfortable working with researchers on evolving requirements.
• Interest 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.
• Prior chip-design experience

Before you apply

• Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements to comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations.
• Background checks for applicants will be administered.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.