SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
OpenAI is hiring a Software Engineer to build research infrastructure and tooling that enables AI systems to design silicon chips. This role sits at the intersection of AI research, model training, and hardware engineering, with the goal of helping semiconductor engineers develop better chips and accelerate design cycles.
You will own the full stack of infrastructure needed to turn chip-design workflows into reliable environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation. Key responsibilities include building and maintaining RL infrastructure, integrating electronic design automation (EDA) tools into workflows for RTL generation and verification, improving experiment reliability and observability, and developing tooling that lets researchers test ideas quickly while measuring correctness and power/performance/area metrics.
The role requires strong software engineering fundamentals and the ability to work across unfamiliar systems—debugging failures across tools, services, and infrastructure. You'll collaborate closely with researchers and hardware specialists to turn successful experiments into reusable systems and training workflows. The team values independent execution, clear technical judgment, and the ability to own ambiguous projects end-to-end.
While prior chip-design experience is helpful, you can learn the domain alongside the team's hardware specialists. Experience with research infrastructure, distributed systems, experiment orchestration, ML tooling, reinforcement learning, Python, containerized environments, or EDA tools is a plus. The role is based in San Francisco and requires in-office presence.
