Hardware Tools Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI.

About the Role

You will develop and evolve the tooling ecosystem that hardware engineers rely on every day — from hardware compilers and IR transformations to simulation, debugging, and automation infrastructure. The work spans software engineering, compiler concepts, and practical hardware workflows, with direct impact on how quickly and effectively we design next-generation AI systems.

You’ll collaborate closely with architects, RTL designers, and verification engineers to translate real engineering friction into durable, scalable tooling solutions.

In this role you will:

• Build and improve the software tooling that makes hardware teams faster: compilation, IR transforms, RTL generation, simulation, debug, and automation.

• Extend and integrate hardware compiler stacks (frontends, IR passes, lowering, scheduling, codegen to Verilog/SystemVerilog) and connect them to real design workflows.

• Improve developer experience and reliability: reproducible builds, better error messages, faster iteration loops, and dependable CI and regression infrastructure.

• Work closely with designers and verification engineers to turn real pain points into durable tools.

• Dive into RTL when needed: read and reason about Verilog/SystemVerilog to debug issues, validate tool output, and improve debuggability.

• Be willing to go all the way down the stack when necessary, including gate-level views, synthesis results, and implementation artifacts.

• Help enable PPA optimization loops by building analysis and automation around area, timing, and power tradeoffs, and by improving tooling that impacts those outcomes.

You might thrive in this role if:

• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain software (projects, internships, research, open source, or equivalent experience).

• Strong CS fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, debugging, and software design.

• Proficiency in at least one of Rust, C++, or Python (and willingness to learn the rest).

• Familiarity with digital design concepts and the ability to read RTL (Verilog/SystemVerilog) or equivalent hardware descriptions.

• Familiarity with compiler or IR-based ideas (representations, passes, transformations, lowering), through coursework or projects.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity and iterating quickly with users of your tools.

Nice to have skills:

• Exposure to compiler and hardware toolchains such as XLS/DSLX, LLVM, Chisel/FIRRTL, CIRCT/MLIR, other novel hardware languages (e.g. HardCaml, SpinalHDL, Spade, PyMTL, Clash, BlueSpec, PyRope)

• Experience with Verilog tooling ecosystems (Yosys/RTLIL, Verilator, Slang) or writing tooling around them.

• Experience with build and test infrastructure (Bazel, CI systems, fuzzing, performance testing).

• Prior work touching synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis, or other PPA-related workflows.

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 OpenAI’s 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 information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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