Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Reliability is a defining differentiator for SaaS products operating at large scale, and this Reliability/DFX Engineer role sits at an unusual intersection of cloud expectations and the physical infrastructure that increasingly underpins AI-enabled software. The listing points to a hardware organization building AI-native silicon and system solutions, with close coupling to software and research partners, which reflects a SaaS-adjacent model where product capabilities are constrained by compute reliability and availability.
For a SaaS career, the durable value here is learning how reliability is designed in, not just monitored after deployment. Work spanning DFX architecture, empirical reliability modeling, and cross-functional alignment with chip, platform, firmware, and system software teams builds a systems view that translates well to SRE, platform engineering, and infrastructure leadership in SaaS companies that run complex workloads. The emphasis on high-ROI features and data-driven experimentation mirrors how mature SaaS organizations prioritize operational improvements.
This role fits an engineer who prefers end-to-end problem solving across layers and is comfortable moving between architecture tradeoffs, implementation details, and measurement. It is particularly aligned with professionals who want to anchor their career in availability and fault tolerance, and who are motivated by long feedback loops typical of silicon and large-scale infrastructure programs.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
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 are seeking a highly skilled cross-stack engineer with deep expertise in making ML systems reliable at scale. This hands-on individual contributor will sit within our hardware team and work closely with chip design, platform design, hardware health, and the broader industry ecosystem to architect, implement, and deploy reliable next-generation AI accelerator systems. This engineer will evaluate system and chip architecture holistically, identify high-ROI opportunities to improve reliability and availability across the stack, and translate those opportunities into strategy and silicon features.
In this role, you will:
Oversee DFX architecture, implementation, and execution in silicon from concept to high-volume deployment, and propose high-ROI features to enhance reliability and fault tolerance. DFX includes design for testability, reliability, availability, and serviceability of high-performance AI hardware.
Build system-level reliability models grounded in empirical data to guide organization-wide DFX and reliability strategy. This requires a detailed understanding of chip and system architecture, design, implementation, and component-level reliability.
Collaborate with chip and platform architecture/design teams to explore and implement DFX features, including the specification and implementation of digital/mixed-signal IP, firmware/system software, and DFX methodology (in partnership with engineering teams).
Partner with hardware health and platform design teams to continuously improve reliability and fault tolerance in NPI and HVM. This includes optimizing operating conditions, designing experiments, and performing data analysis to drive continuous, data-driven improvements across the stack.
Serve as the DFX/reliability champion and evangelist to align the broader industry ecosystem with OpenAI’s requirements and roadmap.
Qualifications:
BS with 15+ years, MS with 10+ years, or PhD with 3+ years of relevant industry experience focused on reliability across the chip/platform stack.
Hands-on experience with RTL design and DFT is required; physical implementation and/or silicon ATE experience is preferred.
Detailed understanding of ML chip and platform architecture and ML workload characteristics is required.
Strong fundamentals in reliability modeling, with hands-on skills in empirical data analysis.
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.
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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