OpenAI

Software Engineer, AI accelerator Runtime

OpenAI$150K — $180K *
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or similar languages.
  • Experience in building runtimes, drivers, firmware, or system software components.
  • Strong knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, and asynchronous execution.
  • Familiarity with memory management and hardware-software interfaces.
  • Hands-on experience with event-based, cycle-accurate simulators or performance models.
  • Ability to analyze scheduling, latency, throughput, and resource trade-offs.
  • Proficient in debugging across software and hardware boundaries.

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement the low-level device runtime for custom silicon.
  • Build kernel-launch scheduling and command submission mechanisms.
  • Manage device memory spaces and ensure efficient data movement.
  • Implement synchronization primitives and guarantees for concurrent workloads.
  • Define interfaces between the runtime, drivers, and higher-level systems.
  • Utilize simulators to develop and performance-tune runtime capabilities.
  • Diagnose performance and correctness issues across software and hardware boundaries.
  • Collaborate with architecture and silicon teams for interface improvements.

Benefits

  • Collaborative work environment with interdisciplinary teams.
  • Opportunities for skill enhancement and professional development.
  • Access to cutting-edge technology and custom silicon design projects.
Full Job Description
About the Role

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.

In this role, you will:
  • 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.

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • 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.

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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