Research Engineer, AI for Chip Design

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $380,000 - $850,000

About The Position

OpenAI is seeking a Research Engineer to join the AI for Chips team, which connects AI model development with hardware design. The team's goal is to leverage advanced AI systems to improve semiconductor engineering, enabling engineers to develop better chips and shorten design cycles. This role involves integrating research, model training, and hardware expertise to create tools focused on correctness and performance for real-world chip designs.

The Research Engineer will be responsible for applying OpenAI models to chip design challenges using reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation techniques. This includes owning experiments from conception to analysis, building environments and evaluations, conducting training, diagnosing failures, and making data-driven decisions for future experiments. The role also requires developing reliable and reproducible software for these experiments. Strong coding fundamentals, sound experimental judgment, and the ability to work independently are highly valued. While prior chip design experience is beneficial, domain knowledge can be acquired alongside hardware specialists.

Requirements

• Strong programming and debugging skills and a track record of turning technical ideas into working software.
• Experience with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, post-training, or other applied ML research.
• Experience building tool-using agents, reward functions, or automated evaluation systems.
• Ability to form clear hypotheses, design useful experiments, and distinguish meaningful results from noise or evaluation errors.
• Ability to work independently on ambiguous problems and make practical decisions about what to build or test next.
• Ability to stay close to the implementation and explain what was built, what failed, and what was learned.
• Ability to communicate progress clearly and collaborate well with people across research, software, and hardware.
• Care about developing safe, beneficial AI.

Nice To Haves

• Familiarity with experiment orchestration, distributed training, or research infrastructure.
• Experience with RTL, Verilog/SystemVerilog, EDA tools, formal verification, or chip-design automation.

Responsibilities

• Build RL environments and evaluations for tasks such as RTL generation, design verification, and physical design optimization.
• Develop and test approaches that help models use chip-design tools and improve power, performance, and area while preserving correctness.
• Design experiments, establish baselines, and measure whether improvements hold up on new tasks and designs.
• Investigate failures across model behavior, rewards, evaluation tools, and experiment infrastructure.
• Improve iteration speed through better tooling, faster evaluations, and proxy rewards that reflect the outcomes we care about.
• Turn successful experiments into reusable research code and training workflows, working closely with researchers and engineers.

Benefits

• OpenAI develops models that can reason through complex problems and hardware designed for the demands of advanced AI.
• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed