There is a Software Engineer, AI accelerator Runtime vacancy at OpenAI, and the role is based in California. Expect a hybrid setup: this is full-time work with regular office days. Pay for this role is set at $266,000 to $445,000 a year, according to the posting.
OpenAI describes the job as follows.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
OpenAI advertises $266,000 to $445,000 a year for this role.
It is hybrid. You would work partly from home and partly from the office in California.
The posting mentions skills such as Rust and C++. Read the full description above for the complete list.
Use the apply button on this page. It takes you to OpenAI's own application form, so your CV goes directly to their hiring team.
OpenAI published the role on August 24, 2026. We check the employer's job board every day and take this page down when the role closes, so if you can read it, the job was still listed at our last check.
Source: OpenAI careers page (jobs.ashbyhq.com). Applications go straight to the employer. We check the listing daily and remove it once it closes.
OpenAI publishes its open roles on its own careers board. This page collects the OpenAI jobs that are live right now. Each listing links to OpenAI's application form, and we remove a listing once the employer closes it.
Industry: Technology
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