Hardware Tools Engineer

About the Team OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering. Our goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance at the center. About the Role We’re hiring a Software Engineer to build the research infrastructure and tooling that help OpenAI models design silicon. You’ll turn chip-design workflows into reliable environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and make it easier for researchers to run experiments and iterate on new ideas. You’ll move between software engineering, tool integration, and open research problems. We value strong coding fundamentals, clear technical judgment, and independent execution. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists. In this role, you will: Build and maintain infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and long-running experiments. Integrate electronic design automation (EDA) tools into workflows for RTL generation, verification, and physical design optimization. Improve experiment reliability, reproducibility, observability, and performance; debug failures across tools, services, and infrastructure. Develop tooling and model harnesses that let researchers test ideas quickly and measure correctness and power, performance, and area (PPA). Collaborate with researchers and engineers to turn successful experiments into reusable systems and training workflows. Own ambiguous projects end to end, communicate progress, and use results to guide the next iteration. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong software engineering fundamentals, with

About the Team OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering. Our goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance at the center. About the Role We’re hiring a Research Engineer to help OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation. You’ll own experiments from the initial idea through implementation and analysis. That means building environments and evaluations, running training, investigating failures, and using the results to decide what to try next. You’ll also build the software needed to make those experiments reliable and reproducible. We value strong coding fundamentals, careful experimental judgment, and the ability to make progress independently. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists. In this role, you will: 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 while preserving correctness. 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 that reflect the outcomes we care about. Turn successful experiments into reusable research code and training workflows, working closely with researchers and engineers. You might thrive in this ro

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 The OpenAI Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role OpenAI Robotics depends on high-quality real-world robot data from a large, live operational environment. That environment has many deployed workcells, changing configurations, and little tolerance for downtime. We are seeking a Field Engineer to help keep that environment running well. You will own the day-to-day technical health of robotic workcells used in ongoing data acquisition operations, diagnose and resolve failures across hardware and software, and build the practical tools, documentation, and support workflows that make operators and technicians more effective. The work is close to the floor, close to the failure modes, and close to the research impact. This role sits at the intersection of software, robotics hardware, and live operations. The best people in it are practical, technically sharp, calm under pressure, and motivated by making real systems work reliably at scale. This role will be based in San Francisco, CA 5 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Serve as an engineering owner for keeping a fleet of robotic workcells online in daily operation. Diagnose, fix, mitigate, or escalate issues spanning mechanics, electronics, controls, software interfaces, logs, and configuration. Partner closely with technicians, operators, and engineering teams to improve scalable fleet support processes. Build or spec lightweight hardware and software tools that improve monitoring, diagnostics, recovery, and handoffs. Create documentation, SOPs, and diagnostic playbooks that turn en

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. In this role you will: As a Hardware Test Engineer, you will work on Machine Learning/AI hardware system projects to craft the solutions for current and future data center deployments. You will bring a strong understanding of hardware system testing, excellent project management skills, and the ability to collaborate across multiple teams to ensure efficient lab operations. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, and executing comprehensive test plans that ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our supercomputing hardware systems. You will develop detailed test plans and methodologies tailored to hardware components, including processors, memory modules, custom accelerators and interconnects. You will collaborate with hardware design, manufacturing, firmware teams and vendors to identify, analyze, and resolve issues affecting hardware, power, thermal and high-speed interconnects. You will perform in-depth debugging on the hardware system Excellent analytical skills to diagnose hardware issues, troubleshoot problems, and propose solutions. Ability to interpret complex test data, identify trends, and draw meaningful conclusions. High-speed links, with a focus on SerDes (Serializer/Deserializer) technology to assess signal integrity, error rates, and overall link performance. You will collaborate with the lab manager to maintain the equipment and hardware systems, including oscilloscopes, thermal test chambers, liquid cooling systems, and other mea

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 As an Engineer on our hardware optimization and co-design team, you will co-design future hardware from different vendors for programmability and performance. You will work with our kernel, compiler and machine learning engineers to understand their unique needs related to ML techniques, algorithms, numerical approximations, programming expressivity, and compiler optimizations. You will evangelize these constraints with various vendors to develop and influence future hardware architectures towards efficient training and inference on our models. If you are excited about efficiently distributing a large language model across devices, dealing with and optimizing system-wide/rack-wide networking bottlenecks and eventually tailoring the compute pipe and memory hierarchy of the hardware platform, simulating workloads at different abstractions and working closely with our partners, this is the perfect opportunity! 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. Key Responsibilities Co-design future hardware for programmability and performance with our hardware vendors Assist hardware vendors in developing optimal kernels and add support for it in our compiler Develop performance estimates for critical kernels for different hardware configurations and drive decisions on compute core and memory h