Software Engineer, AI Accelerator Runtime

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, 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• Strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.
• Experience building runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.
• Understanding of concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.
• Understanding of memory management, address spaces, DMA, caching, coherency, and hardware-software interfaces.
• Hands-on experience with event-based, cycle-accurate simulators or closely related architectural and performance models.
• Ability to reason quantitatively about scheduling, latency, throughput, utilization, contention, and resource tradeoffs.
• Strong debugging skills for failures spanning software abstractions, device interfaces, and hardware behavior.
• Ability to 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. 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 will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent-care expenses, parking, and transit.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may be provided, including charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

The base pay offered may vary depending on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Total compensation also includes equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.