Software Engineer - AI Accelerator Runtime

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 build the low-level device runtime that turns compiled programs into efficient, functional and performant execution on OpenAI’s custom AI accelerator. This software will schedule kernel launches, manage device memory and address spaces, coordinate synchronization, and expose reliable abstractions to higher-level runtimes and frameworks.

You will work at the boundary of software and hardware, partnering with compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, and silicon teams to define interfaces and validate behavior. You will also use and improve event-based, cycle-accurate simulation to develop runtime capabilities before silicon is available, diagnose performance and correctness issues, and guide hardware-software co-design.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement the low-level device runtime for OpenAI custom silicon.

• Build kernel-launch scheduling, command submission, queueing, dependency tracking, and completion handling.

• Manage device memory spaces, allocation, virtual-to-physical mappings, data movement, and lifetime across concurrent workloads.

• Implement synchronization primitives, events, barriers, streams, and ordering guarantees that are correct and efficient.

• Define clean interfaces between the runtime, drivers, firmware, compiler-generated code, kernels, and higher-level execution systems.

• Use event-based, cycle-accurate simulators to develop, validate, debug, and performance-tune runtime behavior before and after silicon availability.

• Diagnose concurrency, memory-ordering, deadlock, race, correctness, and performance issues across software and hardware boundaries.

• Build tests, tracing, profiling, observability, and reproducible workloads for runtime correctness and performance.

• Partner with architecture and silicon teams to turn workload and simulator insights into hardware-software interface improvements.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.

• Have built runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.

• Understand concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.

• Understand memory management, address spaces, DMA, caching, coherency, and hardware-software interfaces.

• Have hands-on experience with event-based, cycle-accurate simulators or closely related architectural and performance models.

• Can reason quantitatively about scheduling, latency, throughput, utilization, contention, and resource tradeoffs.

• Are skilled at debugging failures that span software abstractions, device interfaces, and hardware behavior.

• Work effectively across compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, firmware, and silicon teams.

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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