Software Engineer, AI accelerator Runtime

About the Team

OpenAIs 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 OpenAIs supercomputing platform.

About the Role

You will build the low-level device runtime that turns compiled programs into efficient functional and performant execution on OpenAIs 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 OpenAIs 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 addition job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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Required Experience:

IC