Hardware Tools Engineer in 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, 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 develop and evolve the tooling ecosystem that hardware engineers rely on every day — from hardware compilers and IR transformations to simulation, debugging, and automation infrastructure. The work spans software engineering, compiler concepts, and practical hardware workflows, with direct impact on how quickly and effectively we design next-generation AI systems. You’ll collaborate closely with architects, RTL designers, and verification engineers to translate real engineering friction into durable, scalable tooling solutions. In this role you will: Build and improve the software tooling that makes hardware teams faster: compilation, IR transforms, RTL generation, simulation, debug, and automation. Extend and integrate hardware compiler stacks (frontends, IR passes, lowering, scheduling, codegen to Verilog/SystemVerilog) and connect them to real design workflows. Improve developer experience and reliability: reproducible builds, better error messages, faster iteration loops, and dependable CI and regression infrastructure. Work closely with designers and verification engineers to turn real pain points into durable tools. Dive into RTL when needed: read and reason about Verilog/SystemVerilog to debug issues, validate tool output, and improve debuggability. Be willing to go all the way down the stack when necessary, including gate-level views, synthesis results, and implementation artifacts. Help enable PPA optimization loops by building analysis and au

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 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’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

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're seeking a Security Engineer to join our First-Party Hardware team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end security foundation for OpenAI's first-party AI hardware systems, working across hardware security, embedded security, system security, and practical deployment at data center scale. You will partner with silicon, hardware, firmware, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations, and security teams to define and deliver system-level device trust. This includes boot integrity, device identity, provisioning, attestation, management-plane security, storage encryption, debug controls, firmware update and recovery, RMA, and decommissioning. You will be accountable for turning threat models into requirements, requirements into implementation, and implementation into validation evidence that can support launch decisions. Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid: 3 days/week onsite) Relocation assistance available. In this role, you will: Own security requirements, threat models, validation strategy, and launch-readiness evidence for first-party hardware platforms from early design through production deployment. Design and review secure boot, measured boot, roots of trust, platform firmware resilience, firmware signing, recovery, and anti-rollback strategies across heterogeneous devices. Own device identity, provisioning, enrollment, attestation, certificate lifecycle, and key-management requirements across manufacturing and data center bring-up. Harden management

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

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 As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you’ll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI’s supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads. You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads. Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware. Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments. Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales. Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime b

About the Team The Systems Integration team is responsible for building the infrastructure, tooling, and validation systems that ensure our device software is reliable, testable, and ready to ship. We design and maintain automated test frameworks, hardware-in-the-loop labs, and release pipelines that keep quality signals trustworthy and enable rapid, safe product launches. Our work spans developer tools, automation, systems integration, and cross-team collaboration to ensure every release meets the highest standards. About the Role As a Software Engineer, Quality and Developer Tools , you will build and own the systems that validate our device software—from test frameworks and regression infrastructure to hardware-in-the-loop labs and release gates. You’ll design the tooling and automation that keep quality signals trustworthy, integrate them into CI/CD, and make it easy for engineers and QA vendor technicians to execute reliable, repeatable workflows. We’re looking for engineers with deep experience in software quality, automation, developer tooling, and hardware-software integration who thrive on building scalable, reliable systems for validation and release readiness. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of four days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Test infrastructure & frameworks: Design, implement, and maintain a unified test framework for device software across unit, integration, system, and end-to-end testing, with reproducible runs and integrations with GitHub, Linear, and Slack. CI/CD integration & releases: Integrate test suites with Buildkite, enforce promotion criteria for staging and production, auto-file regressions, and publish traceable artifacts and release notes. Hardware-in-the-loop lab design & orchestration: Plan and bring up racks, power and networking systems, and orchestration for device testing; support automated flashing, provisioning

About the team The Fleet team at OpenAI supports the computing environment that powers our cutting-edge research and product development. We oversee large-scale systems that span data centers, GPUs, networking, and more, ensuring high availability, performance, and efficiency. Our work enables OpenAI’s models to operate seamlessly at scale, supporting both internal research and external products like ChatGPT. We prioritize safety, reliability, and responsible AI deployment over unchecked growth. About the role As a software engineer on the Fleet Hardware team, you will be responsible for the reliability and uptime of all of OpenAI’s compute fleet. Minimizing hardware failure is key to research training progress and stable services, as even a single hardware hiccup can cause significant disruptions. With increasingly large supercomputers, the stakes continue to rise. Being at the forefront of technology means that we are often the pioneers in troubleshooting these state-of-the-art systems at scale. This is a unique opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies and devise innovative solutions to maintain the health and efficiency of our supercomputing infrastructure. Our team empowers strong engineers with a high degree of autonomy and ownership, as well as ability to effect change. This role will require a keen focus on system-level comprehensive investigations and the development of automated solutions. We want people who go deep on problems, investigate as thoroughly as possible, and build automation for detection and remediation at scale. In this role, you will: Build and maintain automation systems for provisioning and managing server fleets. Develop tools to monitor server health, performance, and lifecycle events. Collaborate with clusters, networking, and infrastructure teams. Partner with external operators to ensure a high level of quality. Identify and fix performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Continuously improve automation to reduce manual work

About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team builds next-generation AI-native silicon and systems while working closely with software, research, and manufacturing partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering systems for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team develops the tools, methodologies, and strategic partnerships needed to accelerate hardware innovation. About the Role We’re seeking an experienced Hardware Strategic Sourcing Manager to own sourcing strategy and supplier partnerships for fiber and optical interconnect components across OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure. Reporting to the Head of Partnerships & Strategic Sourcing, you will lead sourcing across fiber cable assemblies, internal optical harnesses, fiber shuffles, optical backplane assemblies, connectorized and standalone passive optical assemblies, fiber-array units (FAUs), fiber-to-chip and coupling interfaces, detachable connectors, optical routing, and assigned optical packaging, assembly, and test services. You will work closely with electrical engineering, optical engineering, systems engineering, mechanical and packaging engineering, quality, rack integration, data-center deployment,manufacturing, supply chain, finance, legal, and program management teams to translate demanding bandwidth, signal integrity, reliability, and scale requirements into resilient supplier partnerships and scalable commercial strategies. Your work will directly support the performance, reliability, manufacturability, and scale of the high-speed optical connectivity required for OpenAI’s next-generation AI systems. In this role, you will: Develop and execute a comprehensive sourcing strategy for fiber and optical interconnect components supporting high-bandwidth AI systems and infrastructure. Own sourcing across optical fiber cable assembli

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’re looking for a Rack Power Engineer with deep expertise in high-power conversion and distribution to design, qualify, and support power systems for AI supercomputers. You will own rack power solutions—including power shelves, AC/DC rectifiers, power supply units (PSUs), power management controllers (PMCs), and high-current distribution—from requirements and supplier development through deployment. You will also monitor fleet rack power health, lead debugging and root-cause investigations, and drive improvements into hardware, firmware, and qualification coverage. 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: Own rack power architecture and requirements for high-power AI supercomputing systems, including power budgets, AC input interfaces, DC distribution, redundancy, efficiency, serviceability, and integration with data center infrastructure. Drive the design and supplier development of power shelves, rectifiers, PSUs, PMCs, busbars, connectors, and protection circuits. Review electrical designs and control behavior, and evaluate performance, cost, reliability, and availability trade-offs. Define and execute component, shelf, and rack qualification plans covering load transients, current sharing, hot-swap, startup and shutdown, redundancy failover, fault protection and recovery, thermal limits, and AC disturbances and ride-through

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 seeking a highly skilled Physical Design Engineer with deep expertise in physical design and methodology. This individual contributor role sits within our physical design team and is central to delivering power, performance, and area (PPA) optimized datapath and interconnect solutions for next-generation AI accelerators. You’ll work closely with RTL designers to define and execute on physical design strategies. You will develop tools, flows and methodologies to increase team productivity. Your work will directly impact silicon’s performance and cost efficiency, as well as the team’s execution velocity and quality. In this role, you will: Develop, build and own tools, flows and methodologies for physical implementation Own physical implementation of floorplan blocks from floorplanning to final signoff Collaborate with RTL designers to drive optimal block implementation solutions Analyze and optimize design for timing, power, and area trade-offs, working in collaboration with EDA vendors and ASIC partners Qualifications: BS w/ 4+ or MS with 2+ years or PhD with 0-1 year(s) of relevant industry experience in physical design and methodology development Demonstrated success in taping out complex silicon designs Hands-on experience with block physical implementation and PPA convergence Strong coding experience with python, bazel, TCL Strong experience building physical design tools, flows and methodologies Strong understanding of microarchitecture, RTL design,