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OpenAIOpenAI

Software Engineer, AI Accelerator Runtime

Build the low-level runtime for a custom AI accelerator, including kernel scheduling, device memory management, synchronization, and hardware-software interfaces. The role requires strong systems programming experience and expertise in concurrency, memory semantics, simulation, and performance debugging.

About the job

Responsibilities

  • 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 lifetimes across concurrent workloads.
  • Implement synchronization primitives, events, barriers, streams, and ordering guarantees.
  • Define 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 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 on hardware-software interface improvements.

Requirements

  • Strong low-level systems programming experience in C, C++, Rust, or comparable environments.
  • Experience building runtimes, drivers, firmware, operating-system components, accelerator software, or adjacent systems infrastructure.
  • Understanding of concurrency, synchronization, asynchronous execution, queues, events, and memory-ordering semantics.
  • Understanding of memory management, address spaces, DMA, caching, coherency, and hardware-software interfaces.
  • Hands-on experience with event-based, cycle-accurate simulators or related architectural and performance models.
  • Ability to reason quantitatively about scheduling, latency, throughput, utilization, contention, and resource tradeoffs.
  • Skilled at debugging issues spanning software abstractions, device interfaces, and hardware behavior.
  • Ability to work across compiler, kernel, architecture, verification, firmware, and silicon teams.

Additional Information

  • Candidates may need to meet legal status requirements under U.S. export control laws and regulations.

Skills

C, C++, Rust, Concurrency, Synchronization, Dma, Caching, Memory Management, Operating Systems, Device Drivers, Firmware, Cycle-Accurate Simulation, Profiling, Virtual Memory

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