Research Engineer, AI for Chip Design

The role

You will help OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation. You will own experiments from initial idea through implementation and analysis by building environments, running training, and developing software.

What you will do

• Build RL environments and evaluations for tasks such as RTL generation, design verification, and physical design optimization.
• Develop and test approaches that help models use chip-design tools and improve power, performance, and area.
• Design experiments, establish baselines, and measure whether improvements hold up on new tasks and designs.
• Investigate failures across model behavior, rewards, evaluation tools, and experiment infrastructure.
• Improve iteration speed through better tooling, faster evaluations, and proxy rewards.
• Turn successful experiments into reusable research code and training workflows.

Required qualifications

• Strong programming and debugging skills.
• Track record of turning technical ideas into working software.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, post-training, or other applied ML research.
• Experience building tool-using agents, reward functions, or automated evaluation systems.
• Ability to form clear hypotheses, design useful experiments, and distinguish meaningful results from noise or evaluation errors.
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous problems and make practical decisions.
• Ability to explain what you built, what failed, and what you learned.
• Ability to communicate progress clearly and collaborate well with people across research, software, and hardware.
• Care about developing safe, beneficial AI.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with experiment orchestration, distributed training, or research infrastructure.
• Experience with RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA tools, formal verification, or chip-design automation.
• Prior chip-design experience is helpful.

Before you apply

• Candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements to comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through their products.