other
Posted Apr 203P Silicon Architect
at openai
San Francisco, United StatesHybrid
Responsibilities
- - Lead early bring-up and evaluation of engineering sample (ES) silicon.
Requirements
- About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops system and infrastructure solutions optimized for advanced AI workloads.
- We collaborate across research, software, and external hardware partners to design and deploy next-generation AI systems at scale.
- Our team works closely with silicon vendors and system partners to evaluate emerging technologies, validate performance characteristics, and ensure that hardware capabilities translate effectively to real-world AI workloads.
- About the Role We are seeking a 3P Hardware Architecture Expert with deep expertise in GPU and accelerator architectures to engage directly with silicon vendors and guide hardware decisions for AI infrastructure.
- This role is highly hands-on and requires both deep technical understanding and the ability to engage at a high level with partners such as NVIDIA and AMD on architectural direction and design tradeoffs.
- Responsibilities - Engage deeply with silicon vendors (e.g NVIDIA & AMD) on GPU and accelerator architecture tradeoffs.
- - Translate vendor specifications into expected real-world performance for AI workloads.
- Qualifications - Have deep expertise in GPU or accelerator architecture, including performance and power tradeoffs. - Understand AI workload behavior and how it interacts with hardware design choices. - Are comfortable engaging directly with silicon vendors at a technical architecture level. - Have hands-on
- experience with benchmarking, profiling, and performance analysis. - Can translate low-level hardware details into system-level and workload-level impact. - Are equally comfortable in theory (architecture) and practice (measurement/validation). - Thrive in environments where you bridge internal teams and external partners. Preferred Skills -
- Experience working with or at companies like (e.g NVIDIA & AMD) or similar silicon providers. - Familiarity with AI accelerator stacks, including GPUs, custom ASICs, or emerging architectures. -
- Experience with early silicon bring-up or hardware validation workflows. - Strong understanding of memory systems (HBM, DDR, cache hierarchies) and data movement bottlenecks. -
- Experience with performance tooling, microbenchmarks, and workload characterization.
- About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence
Additional details
- In this role, you will evaluate architectural tradeoffs across compute, memory, and interconnect systems, translating vendor specifications into real-world workload impact.
- You will play a critical role in early silicon evaluation, benchmarking, and performance validation, helping ensure that next-generation hardware meets the needs of our workloads.
- We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance. Key
- - Analyze and interpret performance, power, and efficiency characteristics of next-generation hardware.
- - Evaluate architectural aspects including: - compute throughput and utilization - memory systems (HBM, cache hierarchies, bandwidth constraints) - data types and precision tradeoffs (FP16, BF16, FP8, etc.) - interconnect and scaling behavior.
- - Run benchmarks and profiling to validate hardware performance against workload requirements.
- - Partner with performance modeling and system architecture teams to align measured vs. modeled behavior.
- - Provide actionable feedback to vendors to influence future silicon design and roadmap decisions.