Software Engineer, Accelerators

About the Position

Software Engineer, Accelerators

Join the innovative team at OpenAI in San Francisco, California, as a Software Engineer focused on accelerators. This role is pivotal in developing and optimizing AI software for new compute platforms, ensuring the efficiency and scalability of our AI workloads.

Location

• San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Type

• Full-time

Compensation

• $295K – $380K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will:

• Prototype and enable OpenAI's AI software stack on new, exploratory accelerator platforms.
• Optimize large-scale model performance (LLMs, recommender systems, distributed AI workloads) for diverse hardware environments.
• Develop kernels, sharding mechanisms, and system scaling strategies tailored to emerging accelerators.
• Collaborate on optimizations at the model code level (e.g. PyTorch) and below to enhance performance on non-traditional hardware. Perform system-level performance modeling, debug bottlenecks, and drive end-to-end optimization.
• Work with hardware teams and vendors to evaluate alternatives to existing platforms and adapt the software stack to their architectures.
• Contribute to runtime improvements, compute/communication overlapping, and scaling efforts for frontier AI workloads.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience working on AI infrastructure, including kernels, systems, or hardware-software co-design
• Hands-on experience with accelerator platforms for AI at data center scale (e.g., TPUs, custom silicon, exploratory architectures).
• Strong understanding of kernels, sharding, runtime systems, or distributed scaling techniques.
• Familiarity with optimizing LLMs, CNNs, or recommender models for hardware efficiency.
• Experience with performance modeling, system debugging, and software stack adaptation for novel architectures.
• Exposure to mobile accelerators is welcome, but experience enabling data center-scale AI hardware is preferred.
• Ability to operate across multiple levels of the stack, rapidly prototype solutions, and navigate ambiguity in early hardware bring-up phases
• Interest in shaping the future of AI compute through exploration of alternatives to mainstream accelerators.

About the Team

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.

About the Company

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.

To 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.

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

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At 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. Join us in shaping the future of technology.