Hardware - San Francisco
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.
About the Role
You will build the low-level device runtime that turns compiled programs into efficientant 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 hardwareance and correctness issues, and guide hardware-software co-design.
In this role, you will:
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Design and implement the low-level device runtime for OpenAI custom silicon.
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Build kernel-launch scheduling, command submission, queueing, dependency tracking, and completion handling.
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Manage device memory spaces, allocation, virtual-to-physical mappings, data movement, and lifetime across concurrent workloads.
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Implement synchronization primitives, events, barriers, streams, and ordering guarantees that are correct and efficient.
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Define clean interfaces between the runtime, drivers, firmware, compiler-generated code, kernels, and higher-level execution systems.
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Use event-basedance-tune runtime behavior before and after silicon availability.
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Diagnose concurrencyance issues across software and hardware boundaries.
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Build testsance.
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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:
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Have strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.
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Have built runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.
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Understand concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.
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Understand memory management, address spaces, DMA, caching, coherency, and hardware-software interfaces.
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Have hands-on experience with event-basedance models.
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Can reason quantitatively about scheduling, latency, throughput, utilization, contention, and resource tradeoffs.
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Are skilled at debugging failures that span software abstractions, device interfaces, and hardware behavior.
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Work effectively across compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, firmware, and silicon teams.
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 the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.
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 – $445K + Offers Equity