OpenAI
Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design
$266K–$468K
San Francisco · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Sep 8, 2026
- Visa sponsorship
- Candidates may need to meet certain legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.
About the job
Build research infrastructure and tooling that enable AI models to design silicon and help researchers run and evaluate chip-design experiments.
What you'll do
- Build and maintain reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and infrastructure for long-running experiments.
- Integrate electronic design automation (EDA) tools for RTL generation, verification, and physical design optimization.
- Develop reliable, observable tooling and model harnesses to test ideas and measure correctness and power, performance, and area (PPA).
What they ask for
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including designing, implementing, and debugging reliable systems.
- Experience independently delivering substantial software projects and explaining technical decisions and impact.
- Ability to work across a stack, investigate unfamiliar failures, and make practical tradeoffs.
- Comfort collaborating with researchers on evolving requirements and open-ended problems.
Nice to have
- Experience with research infrastructure, distributed systems, experiment orchestration, or ML tooling.
- Familiarity with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, training workflows, Python, containerized tools, reproducible development environments, RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA tools, formal verification, or chip-design automation.
Pay
$266K – $468K USD base salary
Tools
Python, RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA
AI focus
Build infrastructure and tools for AI models to design silicon, including reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, training workflows, and model harnesses.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative