EDA Cloud & Developer Infrastructure Engineer

Details

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, its custom silicon program, the team works across silicon architecture, RTL design, verification, physical design, systems software, and infrastructure to deliver highly performant, efficient, and scalable hardware solutions.

The Silicon & Systems team brings together hardware and software engineers to co-design and build the next generation of AI infrastructure. The team operates at the intersection of silicon, systems, and software, tackling complex technical challenges across the full hardware development lifecycle, from early architecture and design through validation, deployment, and production.

About the Role

OpenAI is looking for an Infrastructure Software Engineer to build and scale the infrastructure and developer workflows that power its custom silicon development. The role works closely with engineering teams across design verification, physical design, emulation, formal verification, and systems software to develop reliable, automated, and efficient workflows that accelerate hardware development.

The engineer will own and improve cloud infrastructure, high-performance computing (HPC) environments, CI/CD pipelines, regression systems, and data platforms that support silicon engineering teams. The role involves translating complex hardware development requirements into scalable infrastructure solutions, reducing manual overhead, improving reliability, and enabling engineers to iterate faster.

Responsibilities

• Build developer tools and workflows by partnering with hardware engineering teams to understand development processes, identify bottlenecks, and create tooling, services, and APIs that automate workflows and accelerate engineering productivity.
• Develop and scale regression infrastructure spanning job scheduling, execution, results collection, triage, and reporting, with a focus on performance, reliability, and reproducibility.
• Build and maintain CI/CD infrastructure for infrastructure, developer tooling, and cluster configurations, enabling safe deployments, testing, and continuous improvement.
• Design, provision, and operate cloud infrastructure and high-performance compute clusters, optimizing scheduling, capacity, reliability, and cost efficiency for demanding silicon development workloads.
• Build data infrastructure and observability systems, including data pipelines, databases, and monitoring systems that provide visibility into regression results, infrastructure health, resource utilization, and engineering efficiency.
• Troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues, improve monitoring and alerting, automate recovery processes, and build resilient, maintainable, and scalable systems.
• Collaborate with engineers across RTL, verification, physical design, emulation, and software to continuously improve the infrastructure supporting silicon development.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in Python or a similar programming language and experience building reliable automation, tools, or infrastructure services.
• Deep technical expertise in at least one infrastructure area, such as Linux/HPC environments, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD systems, storage, networking, or EDA development workflows.
• Experience designing, deploying, and operating cloud infrastructure, preferably Azure.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Bicep.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge, including processes, filesystems, networking, permissions, performance troubleshooting, and system administration.
• Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar platforms.
• Ability to debug complex distributed infrastructure problems, identify root causes, and implement durable solutions.
• Ability to work closely with engineering teams to understand technical requirements and translate them into scalable, practical infrastructure solutions.
• Experience owning systems end to end, from design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and ongoing operational improvements.
• Strong technical judgment, clear communication, and a collaborative approach to solving ambiguous engineering challenges.
• Curiosity about hardware development and interest in expanding technical expertise across infrastructure, silicon design workflows, and developer productivity.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience supporting ASIC or semiconductor development environments, including EDA workflows, design verification, physical design, emulation, or formal verification.
• Experience operating large-scale HPC clusters or workload schedulers such as Slurm.
• Familiarity with compute farms, regression frameworks, build systems, and hardware development toolchains.
• Experience with enterprise identity and authentication systems such as Entra ID, OpenLDAP, FreeIPA, or SSSD.
• Experience designing and operating relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, including schema design, migrations, query optimization, and backups.
• Familiarity with distributed systems components, including message queues, caching layers, artifact storage, and backend services.
• Experience with high-performance storage systems, data movement optimization, or large-scale compute infrastructure.
• Experience managing EDA license servers, license utilization, or other shared infrastructure resources in hardware development environments.

Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control 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. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.