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Research Engineer, AI for Chip Design

OpenAI· Research
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Hybrid (San Francisco)Full-timePosted 1mo ago

About the role

We’re hiring a Research Engineer to help OpenAI models solve chip-design problems through reinforcement learning, tool use, and evaluation. You’ll own experiments from idea to implementation and analysis, build environments and evaluations, run training, investigate failures, and create reproducible research tooling.

Responsibilities

  • Build RL environments and evaluations for tasks such as RTL generation, design verification, and physical design optimization.
  • Develop and test approaches that help models use chip-design tools and improve power, performance, and area while preserving correctness.
  • Design experiments, establish baselines, and measure whether improvements hold up on new tasks and designs.
  • Investigate failures across model behavior, rewards, evaluation tools, and experiment infrastructure.
  • Improve iteration speed through better tooling, faster evaluations, and proxy rewards that reflect the outcomes we care about.
  • Turn successful experiments into reusable research code and training workflows, working closely with researchers and engineers.

Qualifications

  • Have strong programming and debugging skills and a track record of turning technical ideas into working software.
  • Experience with reinforcement learning, model evaluations, post-training, or other applied ML research.
  • Experience building tool-using agents, reward functions, or automated evaluation systems.
  • Can form clear hypotheses, design useful experiments, and distinguish meaningful results from noise or evaluation errors.
  • Work independently on ambiguous problems and make practical decisions about what to build or test next.
  • Stay close to the implementation and can explain what you built, what failed, and what you learned.
  • Communicate progress clearly and collaborate well with people across research, software, and hardware.
  • Care about developing safe, beneficial AI.

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Sep 17, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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