Infrastructure Software Engineer - EDA Cloud & Developer Infrastructure

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, our custom silicon program, the team works across silicon architecture, RTL design, verification, physical design, systems software, and infrastructure to deliver highly performant, efficient, and scalable hardware solutions.

The Silicon & Systems team brings together hardware and software engineers to co-design and build the next generation of AI infrastructure. We operate at the intersection of silicon, systems, and software, tackling complex technical challenges across the full hardware development lifecycle, from early architecture and design through validation, deployment, and production.

About the Role

We’re looking for an Infrastructure Software Engineer to build and scale the infrastructure and developer workflows that power OpenAI’s custom silicon development. You’ll work closely with engineering teams across design verification, physical design, emulation, formal verification, and systems software to develop reliable, automated, and efficient workflows that accelerate hardware development.

In this role, you'll own and improve the cloud infrastructure, high-performance computing (HPC) environments, CI/CD pipelines, regression systems, and data platforms that support our silicon engineering teams. You'll translate complex hardware development requirements into scalable infrastructure solutions, reducing manual overhead, improving reliability, and enabling engineers to iterate faster.

This is a highly collaborative, hands-on role with opportunities to drive improvements across the entire hardware development lifecycle. We're looking for engineers who bring deep expertise in one or more infrastructure domains, strong software engineering fundamentals, and an interest in expanding their impact across the broader platform.

In this role, you will:

• Build developer tools and workflows: Partner with hardware engineering teams to understand their development processes, identify bottlenecks, and build tooling, services, and APIs that automate workflows and accelerate engineering productivity.

• Develop and scale regression infrastructure: Design, implement, and operate large-scale regression systems spanning job scheduling, execution, results collection, triage, and reporting, with a focus on performance, reliability, and reproducibility.

• Own CI/CD infrastructure: Build and maintain automated pipelines for infrastructure, developer tooling, and cluster configurations, enabling safe deployments, testing, and continuous improvement.

• Scale cloud and HPC environments: Design, provision, and operate cloud infrastructure and high-performance compute clusters, optimizing scheduling, capacity, reliability, and cost efficiency to support demanding silicon development workloads.

• Build data infrastructure and observability: Develop data pipelines, databases, and monitoring systems that provide visibility into regression results, infrastructure health, resource utilization, and engineering efficiency.

• Drive platform reliability and operational excellence: Troubleshoot complex infrastructure issues, improve monitoring and alerting, automate recovery processes, and build systems that are resilient, maintainable, and scalable.

• Collaborate across hardware and software teams: Work directly with engineers across RTL, verification, physical design, emulation, and software to continuously improve the infrastructure supporting OpenAI's silicon development.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong software engineering fundamentals, with proficiency in Python or a similar programming language and experience building reliable automation, tools, or infrastructure services.

• Bring deep technical expertise in at least one area of infrastructure engineering, such as Linux/HPC environments, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD systems, storage, networking, or EDA development workflows.

• Have experience designing, deploying, and operating cloud infrastructure, preferably Azure, with familiarity in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or Bicep.

• Have strong Linux systems knowledge, including processes, filesystems, networking, permissions, performance troubleshooting, and system administration.

• Have experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Buildkite, GitHub Actions, or similar platforms.

• Are comfortable debugging complex distributed infrastructure problems, identifying root causes, and implementing durable solutions.

• Enjoy working closely with engineering teams to understand technical requirements and translate them into scalable, practical infrastructure solutions.

• Take ownership of systems end to end, from initial design and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and ongoing operational improvements.

• Bring strong technical judgment, clear communication, and a collaborative approach to solving ambiguous engineering challenges.

• Are curious about hardware development and excited to expand your technical expertise across infrastructure, silicon design workflows, and developer productivity.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience supporting ASIC or semiconductor development environments, including EDA workflows, design verification, physical design, emulation, or formal verification.

• Experience operating large-scale HPC clusters or workload schedulers such as Slurm.

• Familiarity with compute farms, regression frameworks, build systems, and hardware development toolchains.

• Experience with enterprise identity and authentication systems, such as Entra ID, OpenLDAP, FreeIPA, or SSSD.

• Experience designing and operating relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL, including schema design, migrations, query optimization, and backups.

• Familiarity with distributed systems components, including message queues, caching layers, artifact storage, and backend services.

• Experience with high-performance storage systems, data movement optimization, or large-scale compute infrastructure.

• Experience managing EDA license servers, license utilization, or other shared infrastructure resources in hardware development environments.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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