Hardware / Software CoDesign Engineer - 3P

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 On the Accelerators team, you will help OpenAI evaluate and bring up new compute platforms that can support large-scale AI training and inference. Your work will range from prototyping system software on new accelerators to enabling performance optimizations across our AI workloads. You’ll work across the stack, collaborating with both hardware and software aspects - working on kernels, sharding strategies, scaling across distributed systems, and performance modeling. You'll help adapt OpenAI's software stack to non-traditional hardware and drive efficiency improvements in core AI workloads. This is not a compiler-focused role, rather bridging ML algorithms with system performance - especially at scale. In this role, you will: Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms. Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments. Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators. Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization. Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures. Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication over

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. In this role, you will: 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. Di

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 We are looking for a systems-minded engineer to help advance our kernel development, performance engineering, and hardware-software co-design capabilities, with a particular focus on AI-assisted workflows and tooling. This person will work at the intersection of kernel optimization, developer tooling, observability, and research infrastructure, helping us improve both how production kernels are built and optimized, and how future hardware-software systems are designed and evaluated. The role is ideal for someone who is excited by low-level performance work, but also sees AI and automation as powerful tools for accelerating engineering velocity. You will help define the future of kernel engineering in the era of AI-assisted development. In this role, you may: Build developer tooling and workflows that make kernel development and performance optimization faster, more scalable, and easier to debug, integrate, and deploy. Develop observability, diagnostics, and validation infrastructure that makes AI-assisted optimization systems more interpretable, reliable, and effective. Optimize production kernels end to end by formulating optimization problems, running search loops, analyzing bottlenecks, debugging generated implementations, and landing improvements into production. Design abstractions, interfaces, and automation systems that accelerate kernel optimization, correctness validation, and hardware-software co-design. Improve AI-assisted optimization systems for sp

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 We are looking for an embedded engineer to help build firmware and associated modeling software for OpenAI’s in house AI accelerator. This role involves designing and developing drivers and functional models for a large array of HW components, writing high throughput and low latency firmware code, investigating bring-up and production issues. Responsibilities Design and implement drivers for hardware peripherals, including those related to AI chips. Design and implement functional software models to simulate SoC uncore logic and enable FW testing against the model Design and implement low-latency and high throughput embedded SW to manage HW resources. Work with adjacent software and hardware teams to implement requirements, debug issues and shape future generations of the hardware. Collaborate with vendors to integrate their technologies within our systems. Bring up and debug firmware/driver on new platforms. Come up with processes and debug issues raised in the field. Set up monitoring, integration testing and diagnostics tools. Qualifications 5+ years of experience working in embedded SW space. Ability to thrive in ambiguity and learn new technologies. Strong programming skills in C/C++ and/or Rust. Experience developing high throughput, low latency and multi-threaded code. Experience working with real time operating systems (RTOS). Experience developing hardware drivers and working with hardware Experience with HW/SW co-design Knowledge of common embedded pr

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 model runtime within the inference engine that executes complex, frontier models at scale on OpenAI’s custom silicon. The runtime will sit between models running on the hardware and the upper layers of the cluster serving software stack, translating demanding inference workloads into efficient execution while optimizing for throughput, latency, utilization, and reliability. You will work across model architecture, distributed systems, compilers, kernels, and silicon to design a production-grade runtime comparable in ambition to systems such as vLLM and SGLang, but customized and optimized for OpenAI’s AI accelerator. Your work will shape how new model capabilities map onto the platform and how quickly custom silicon can deliver meaningful performance in production. In this role, you will: Design and implement the LLM inference runtime for frontier models running on custom silicon. Build scheduling, continuous batching, memory management, KV-cache management, and execution orchestration for high-performance inference. Develop distributed execution strategies across chips, hosts, and racks, including model partitioning, communication, and synchronization. Optimize end-to-end latency, throughput, memory efficiency, and hardware utilization across diverse model architectures and serving workloads. Partner with kernel, compiler, architecture, and silicon teams to co-design interfaces and remove performance bottlenecks across the stack. Enable new

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Mechanical Engineer with 7+ years of experience in design of IT hardware from chip/package to system levels. You’ll work alongside experts in thermal, mechanical, electrical, software, and systems engineering to support the design, analysis, and validation of mechanical and thermal systems that ensure the reliability, efficiency, and longevity of mission-critical hardware. This position requires strong analytical skills, hands-on testing experience, and the ability to work in a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary environment. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Lead mechanical design for AI supercomputer product in the data center application Collaborate with the cross functional team to design and optimize thermal solutions for data center hardware, including chips, power modules, and system-level cooling architectures Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate thermal management strategies into hardware design, from concept to mass production Design and validate mechanical systems, including chassis, enclosures, cooling systems, and high-power connections, ensuring alignment with performance and reliability standards. Perform 3D modeling, FEA, tolerance analysis, and prototyping, ensuring manufacturability and a