{"id":557667,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-software-engineer-ai-for-chip-design","title":"Software Engineer, AI for Chip Design","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":78,"open_postings":194,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.861,"repost_share":0.005,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-28T05:59:10Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":266000,"max":468000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":468000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Reinforcement Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Formal Verification","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"SystemVerilog","optional":true},{"name":"Verilog","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-08T23:43:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-08","last_verified_at":"2026-10-28T07:13:47Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":49,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":49},"description":"About the Team\nOpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI. AI for Chips connects these efforts: applying increasingly capable AI systems to the work of semiconductor engineering.\nOur goal is to help engineers develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This work brings research, model training, and hardware expertise together to build tools that engineers can use on real designs, with correctness and measurable performance at the center.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re hiring a Software Engineer to build the research infrastructure and tooling that help OpenAI models design silicon. You’ll turn chip-design workflows into reliable environments for reinforcement learning and evaluation, and make it easier for researchers to run experiments and iterate on new ideas.\nYou’ll move between software engineering, tool integration, and open research problems. We value strong coding fundamentals, clear technical judgment, and independent execution. Prior chip-design experience is helpful, but you can learn the domain alongside the team’s hardware specialists.\nIn this role, you will:\nBuild and maintain infrastructure for reinforcement learning environments, evaluations, and long-running experiments.\n\nIntegrate electronic design automation (EDA) tools into workflows for RTL generation, verification, and physical design optimization.\n\nImprove experiment reliability, reproducibility, observability, and performance; debug failures across tools, services, and infrastructure.\n\nDevelop tooling and model harnesses that let researchers test ideas quickly and measure correctness and power, performance, and area (PPA).\n\nCollaborate with researchers and engineers to turn successful experiments into reusable systems and training workflows.\n\nOwn ambiguous projects end to end, communicate progress, and use results to guide the next iteration.\n\nYou might thrive in this role if you:\nHave strong software engineering fundamentals, with experience designing, implementing, and debugging reliable systems.\n\nCan work across a stack, investigate unfamiliar failures, and make practical tradeoffs between speed, correctness, and maintainability.\n\nHave independently delivered substantial software projects and can explain your technical decisions and their impact.\n\nAre comfortable working with researchers on evolving requirements and turning open-ended problems into working software.\n\nAre interested in learning how reinforcement learning and chip-design tools fit together.\n\nCare about developing safe, beneficial AI.\n\nNice to have:\nExperience with research infrastructure, distributed systems, experiment orchestration, or ML tooling.\n\nFamiliarity with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, or training workflows.\n\nExperience with Python, containerized tools, and reproducible development environments.\n\nExperience with RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA tools, formal verification, or chip-design automation.\n\nTo 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.\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. 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