OpenAI · 11 hours ago
Research-Hardware Codesign Engineer
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Mid, Senior Level
$230K/yr - $460K/yrOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Research-Hardware Codesign Engineer will work at the intersection of model research and silicon/system architecture, helping to shape future silicon technology while collaborating with research and hardware teams.
Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
Responsibilities
Build on our roofline simulator to track evolving workloads, and deliver analyses that quantify the impact of system architecture decisions and support technology pathfinding
Debug gaps between performance simulation and real measurements; clearly communicate root cause, bottlenecks, and invalid assumptions
Write emulation kernels for low-precision numerics and lossy compression schemes, and get Research the information they need to trade efficiency with model quality
Prototype numerics modules by pushing RTL through synthesis; hand off novel numerics cleanly, or occasionally own an RTL module end-to-end
Proactively pull in new ML workloads, prototype them with rooflines and/or functional simulation, and drive initial evaluation of new opportunities or risks
Understand the whole picture from ML science to hardware optimization, and slice this end-to-end objective into near-term deliverables
Build ad-hoc collaborations across teams with very different goals and areas of expertise, and keep progress unblocked
Communicate design tradeoffs clearly with explicit assumptions and confidence levels; produce a trail of evidence that enables confident execution
Qualification
Required
An exceptional track record of high-quality technical output, and a bias for shipping a prototype now and iterating later in the absence of clear requirements
Strong Python, and C++ or Rust, with a cautious attitude toward correctness and an intuition for clean extensibility
Practical understanding of floating point numerics, the ML tradeoffs of reduced precision, and the current state of the art in model quantization
Deep understanding of transformer models, and strong intuition for transformer rooflines and the tradeoffs of sharded training and inference in large-scale ML systems
Strong cross-functional communication (e.g. across ML researchers and hardware engineers); ability to slice ambiguous early-incubation ideas into concrete arenas in which progress can be made
Preferred
Experience writing Triton, CUDA, or similar, and an understanding of the resulting mapping of tensor ops to functional units
Working knowledge of PyTorch or JAX; experience in large ML codebases is a plus
Experience writing RTL (especially for floating point logic) and understanding of PPA tradeoffs is a plus
Benefits
Relocation assistance available.
Company
OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
Founded in 2015
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$79BKey Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B
Leadership Team
Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
Recent News
BNN Bloomberg
2026-01-13
2026-01-13
Company data provided by crunchbase