Hardware Lead

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

20h

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed