Software Engineer, AI accelerator Runtime

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

2d • $266,000 - $445,000

About The Position

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.

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.

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.

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.

Benefits

• OpenAI is 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.
• 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.
• We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

What This Job Offers

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