Description
Compensation
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
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.
Responsibilities
- 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.
Requirements
- 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.