Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This ASIC Firmware Engineer, Modeling role sits at the infrastructure layer that increasingly underpins modern SaaS, especially as AI-driven products depend on specialized compute. While the employer is not a traditional SaaS vendor, the work supports large-scale AI systems that SaaS teams consume indirectly through platforms, APIs, and internal supercomputing environments. That makes the position relevant to the broader SaaS ecosystem where performance, reliability, and cost per workload shape product feasibility.
Career-wise, the role builds durable systems expertise that translates into SaaS organizations operating high-throughput services. Experience with firmware, driver development, functional modeling, and hardware bring-up strengthens an engineer’s ability to reason about latency, resource scheduling, observability, and failure modes end to end. The cross-functional nature of hardware and software co-design also mirrors how mature SaaS companies coordinate across platform, infrastructure, and product engineering when scaling critical systems.
This is best suited to engineers who prefer deep technical ownership, rigorous debugging, and working across abstraction layers rather than staying purely in application code. It will fit professionals who enjoy ambiguity, value strong fundamentals in C/C++ or Rust, and want their work to influence how higher-level software is ultimately constrained and enabled by underlying compute.
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 looking for an embedded engineer to help build firmware and associated modeling software for OpenAI’s in house AI accelerator. This role involves designing and developing drivers and functional models for a large array of HW components, writing high throughput and low latency firmware code, investigating bring-up and production issues.
Responsibilities
Design and implement drivers for hardware peripherals, including those related to AI chips.
Design and implement functional software models to simulate SoC uncore logic and enable FW testing against the model
Design and implement low-latency and high throughput embedded SW to manage HW resources.
Work with adjacent software and hardware teams to implement requirements, debug issues and shape future generations of the hardware.
Collaborate with vendors to integrate their technologies within our systems.
Bring up and debug firmware/driver on new platforms.
Come up with processes and debug issues raised in the field.
Set up monitoring, integration testing and diagnostics tools.
Qualifications
5+ years of experience working in embedded SW space.
Ability to thrive in ambiguity and learn new technologies.
Strong programming skills in C/C++ and/or Rust.
Experience developing high throughput, low latency and multi-threaded code.
Experience working with real time operating systems (RTOS).
Experience developing hardware drivers and working with hardware
Experience with HW/SW co-design
Knowledge of common embedded protocols, e.g. UART, I2C, SPI, etc.
Knowledge of microprocessor and common ARM architectures (e.g. AMBA) is a plus.
Knowledge of PCIe, ethernet and other high BW communication protocols is a plus.
Experience with GPUs or other compute hardware is a plus.
Experience deploying large compute clusters 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.
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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
