Hardware Lead

The org focuses on harnessing frontier AI models to transform scientific, strategic, economically important domains. They build partnerships with established industry leaders to solve distribution challenges and help bring AI innovation to these spaces. The team operates like a startup within OpenAI, with unmatched research depth, compute, and real-world impact.

We’re looking for a Hardware Lead to drive the technical direction of a small, highly specialized team. In this role, you’ll work to improve our models’ ability to understand, reason about, and impact compute hardware development, while also contributing hands-on as an individual contributor.

This is a “player-coach” role: you’ll set technical direction, mentor and manage a small team, and directly design experiments and research artifacts yourself.

• Co-lead and grow small hardware-focused team working on model-driven and hardware co-design

• Act as a hands-on technical contributor, designing and implementing hardware abstractions, tools, and evaluation frameworks

• Develop and evaluate methods that enable models to reason about hardware architectures, constraints, and tradeoffs

• Help define the long-term research roadmap at the intersection of AI models and hardware design
  

• Have deep experience in hardware architecture, silicon development, or hardware-software co-design

• Are comfortable operating as a senior individual contributor while also leading and mentoring others

• Enjoy ambiguous, research-driven problems with medium to long term payoff

• Can translate hardware realities to ML concepts (and vice versa)

• Are excited about the idea of AI systems meaningfully shaping future compute hardware

About OpenAI

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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