Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role stands out in the SaaS ecosystem because it sits at the point where productized AI meets real enterprise delivery. Forward Deployed Engineering is increasingly common in modern SaaS and AI platforms that need to prove value in complex customer environments before those learnings can be standardized into repeatable product capabilities. Here, the domain is semiconductor design verification, which adds a deep industry workflow layer to the usual “platform plus customer” operating model.
For a SaaS career, the durable value is learning how high-touch deployments become scalable patterns. The work emphasizes evaluation design, workflow translation, and lightweight prototyping, all of which map to how SaaS teams harden new capabilities into something reliable across accounts. It also builds fluency in cross-functional influence, where product, research, and delivery constraints have to be reconciled through clear technical judgment rather than roadmap authority.
The role fits professionals who prefer being a hands-on subject matter anchor while gradually expanding into broader ownership. It will suit someone motivated by ambiguity at the interface of customer reality and platform development, and who wants their technical depth to shape how an AI-driven offering is validated, packaged, and reused across deployments.
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 Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with leading semiconductor companies to deploy production-grade AI systems across the entire chip design lifecycle: design, verification, and physical design. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding deeply with customers to translate frontier model capabilities into systems that materially reduce design cycles, improve verification quality, and accelerate innovation.
Our work turns early, high-touch deployments into reusable solution patterns, evaluation practices, and technical playbooks that scale across the semiconductor ecosystem.
About the Role
We are seeking an experienced Design Verification Engineer to join our semiconductor-focused Forward Deployed Engineering team. This is an IC role that will begin with a strong emphasis on design verification expertise, evaluation curation, and technical leverage across deployments, with the expectation that the person will grow into a broader Forward Deployed Engineering role over time.
In the near term, you will serve as a senior technical SME for verification workflows: helping FDEs, Product, and Research teams understand how DV work is done in practice, pressure-testing AI-assisted verification ideas against real engineering workflows, and raising the quality of our solutions through deep domain judgment. You will help the broader team build fluency in verification methodology, tooling, and trade-offs.
Over time, we expect this role to expand beyond SME support into broader FDE ownership: partnering directly with customers, shaping deployment strategy, building and iterating production-grade AI systems, driving technical workstreams, and helping turn high-touch semiconductor deployments into repeatable solutions.
This is a strong fit for someone who brings deep design verification expertise today and is excited to grow into a customer-facing, systems-building, delivery-oriented FDE role.
In this role, you will:
Serve as the design verification SME for semiconductor deployments, helping teams reason about verification workflows across block, subsystem, and SoC environments
Shape AI-assisted workflows for test generation, regression triage, debug, root-cause analysis, and coverage closure
Curate evaluations with FDEs and customer SMEs, including golden tasks, labeled examples, rubrics, acceptance criteria, and realistic benchmarks grounded in solved issues and real engineering workflows
Build lightweight prototypes, eval harnesses, and tooling that validate opportunities and improve solution quality
Educate and mentor the broader FDE team on verification concepts, tooling, and methodology so the org can engage semiconductor workflows with greater depth and confidence
Partner with FDEs during customer discovery and scoping to translate ambiguous pain points into clear solution hypotheses, success criteria, and technical plans
Support customer-facing technical conversations as a trusted advisor, engaging credibly with technical leaders
Progressively take on broader FDE responsibilities, including customer discovery, solution architecture, prototype development, production deployment, and ownership of technical workstreams
Minimum Qualifications:
BS/MS in EE, CE, CS, or equivalent with 5+ years of experience in design verification for complex IP, subsystem, or SoC programs
Demonstrated success verifying complex hardware systems in industry-standard flows, with deep familiarity in block-, subsystem-, and/or top-level verification methodologies
Strong hands-on expertise in SystemVerilog, UVM, and common simulation/debug tools such as VCS, Questa, Verdi, or equivalent
Strong understanding of constrained-random verification, directed testing, scoreboards, checkers, monitors, stimulus generation, regression infrastructure, and coverage analysis
Strong knowledge of computer architecture, RTL/microarchitecture, memory systems, coherency, interconnects, and verification methodology
Experience defining verification plans, triaging bugs, and driving debug and root-cause analysis in close partnership with design teams
Strong scripting and automation skills in Python or similar; experience building verification tooling, harnesses, or workflow automation is a plus
Comfortable operating as a consultative expert who can shape technical direction, evaluate solution quality, and raise the bar across multiple deployments
Excited to grow beyond domain SME responsibilities into a broader Forward Deployed Engineering role, including hands-on solution building, customer-facing delivery, and ownership of deployment outcomes
Preferred Qualifications:
Experience across multiple semiconductor companies, design environments, or tool stacks, with a point of view shaped by different verification cultures and methodologies
Familiarity with adjacent domains such as RTL design, formal verification, emulation, performance analysis, or physical design
Experience applying AI/LLM systems to semiconductor workflows
Experience creating reusable evals, methodology assets, or technical playbooks
Prior experience in customer-facing, consultative, field engineering, solutions engineering, or technical delivery roles
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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