Emulation Engineer

About the Team

OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops silicon and system-level solutions designed for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. The team is responsible for building the next generation of AI-native silicon while working closely with software and research partners to co-design hardware tightly integrated with AI models. In addition to delivering production-grade silicon for OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, the team also creates custom design tools and methodologies that accelerate innovation and enable hardware optimized specifically for AI.

About the Role
We’re seeking an experienced Emulation Engineer to help accelerate the development and validation of OpenAI’s custom ML accelerators. In this role, you’ll architect hardware emulation platforms to enable early software development, system-level testing, and fast iteration cycles across hardware and software teams. You’ll be a critical bridge between design, DV, performance, and software teams—enabling scalable, high-fidelity validation of next-generation AI silicon.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain pre-silicon emulation platforms using commercial emulators (e.g., Veloce, Palladium, ZeBu)

• Work with RTL and DV teams to bring-up and validate designs on emulation systems.

• Develop transactors, models, and acceleration-aware testbenches to maximize throughput and observability.

• Enable fast and reliable software bring-up by integrating firmware and drivers with emulated hardware.

• Partner with performance, software, and validation teams to root cause bugs and optimize system behavior.

• Support continuous regression infrastructure and automation for long-running, system-scale workloads.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in EE/CE/CS or equivalent with 5+ years of experience in emulation or FPGA-based prototyping.

• Deep familiarity with RTL design (SystemVerilog/VHDL), simulation, and emulation flows.

• Experience with at least one major emulation platform (Palladium, Veloce, or ZeBu) and their toolchains.

• Experience with building large scale emulation systems, optimizing build reliability, efficiency and performance.

• Experience with integrating various IO speedbridge and memory components.

• Strong scripting skills (Python, Tcl, Shell) and experience building automation infrastructure.

• Ability to debug complex HW/SW interactions and performance bottlenecks in large systems.

• Experience in ML accelerator or SoC emulation environments is a plus.

To comply with U.S. export control laws and regulations, candidates for this role may need to meet certain legal status requirements as provided in those laws and regulations.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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