OpenAI

Senior RTL Engineer, Interconnect Design

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Information Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience in SoC interconnect and RTL design
  • Expertise in Verilog/SystemVerilog for production-quality RTL
  • Strong knowledge of interconnect concepts, including topology and optimization
  • Experience with protocols like AXI, PCIe, and Ethernet
  • Ability to manage design trade-offs in performance, power, and area
  • Excellent communication and mentorship skills
  • Experience in a collaborative, cross-functional engineering environment

Responsibilities

  • Own the design and delivery of SoC interconnect components
  • Drive third-party engagements for novel networking protocols
  • Perform hands-on microarchitecture and RTL development
  • Collaborate on large-scale custom silicon execution
  • Analyze traffic patterns for interconnect optimization
  • Develop verification strategies in collaboration with verification teams
  • Partner with physical design teams for implementation at target specifications
  • Lead design and architecture reviews while mentoring others

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with 3 days in-office per week
  • Relocation assistance for new hires
Full Job Description
About the Role

We are looking for a highly experienced RTL engineer to own critical on- and off-chip interconnect components for our custom AI accelerator platform. You will drive the microarchitecture and RTL implementation of scalable on-chip communication fabrics connecting high-bandwidth compute, memory, and I/O subsystems as well as purpose-built off-chip interfaces and protocols needed to enable custom computing at scale.

This is a senior, hands-on engineering role with broad technical ownership. You will drive design from requirements through the full silicon lifecycle, from architecture definition and performance analysis through RTL implementation, verification closure, physical design convergence, bring-up, and production readiness. You will plan and oversee the work of junior engineers and help drive and develop productive engineering relationships with external partners and help manage partner execution.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
  • Own the microarchitecture, RTL design, and delivery of major SoC interconnect components, including network-on-chip fabrics, switches, routers, bridges, protocol adapters, arbiters, and traffic-management logic as well as off-chip protocol bridges and interfaces.
  • Drive third party engagements to develop novel networking and interface protocols and silicon IP while ensuring high quality and design integrity, leveraging deep technical and non-technical leadership skills.
  • Perform substantial direct microarchitecture and RTL coding work.
  • Collaborate with architecture and design team members on the overall solution and execution plan for cutting-edge large-scale custom silicon.
  • Work with performance and architecture teams to analyze traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks, and optimize interconnect behavior under realistic system workloads.
  • Collaborate with design verification teams to develop verification strategies, coverage plans, assertions, stress scenarios, and debug approaches for highly concurrent fabric behavior.
  • Partner with physical design teams to ensure interconnect structures are implementable at target frequency, power, and area, including floorplan-aware design, pipeline strategy, timing closure, and congestion management.
  • Provide technical leadership through design reviews, architecture reviews, documentation, mentoring, and development of reusable RTL and integration methodologies.
  • Leverage experience to help raise the bar on design work inside our team.
  • Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty!
You might thrive in this role if you have:
  • Extensive industry experience designing and delivering complex SoC interconnect, NoC, coherent fabric, memory subsystem, cache-coherent, or chip-level integration solutions.
  • A strong track record of owning major RTL blocks or SoC subsystems from microarchitecture through tape-out and silicon bring-up.
  • Deep expertise in Verilog/SystemVerilog and the development of clean, parameterized, production-quality RTL.
  • Strong understanding of interconnect concepts such as topology, routing, arbitration, virtual channels, flow control, buffering, ordering, quality of service, coherency, deadlock avoidance, congestion management, and performance monitoring.
  • Experience with common on-chip or chip-to-chip protocols and interfaces, such as AXI, APB, CXL, PCIe, Ethernet.
  • Experience building custom networking protocols or protocol extensions.
  • Experience working designing and implementing subsystems in the context of large scale systems built with RDMA/RoCE or other HPC-style system-level interconnects.
  • Familiarity and deep experience with the full spectrum of industry-standard RTL-adjacent development and signoff flows, including lint, CDC/RDC, synthesis, formal verification, static timing analysis, power analysis, and design-for-test considerations.
  • Experience working closely with architecture, verification, physical design, firmware, performance, and post-silicon teams to deliver complex silicon.
  • Strong judgment in making practical design tradeoffs across performance, power, area, schedule, verification risk, and physical implementation constraints.
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive alignment across multiple teams.
  • Passion for achieving high leverage through complexity reduction, automation and creative pragmatism.
Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience designing interconnect for AI accelerators, GPUs, CPUs, high-performance computing systems, networking silicon, or large-scale datacenter silicon.
  • Experience with memory consistency, virtualization, isolation, RAS, telemetry, or security requirements within complex SoCs.
  • Experience with NoC performance modeling, traffic simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, or post-silicon performance analysis.
  • Experience leading architecture or RTL delivery for first-generation silicon programs or rapidly evolving hardware platforms.

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 artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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