Computer Hardware Engineer Intern Jobs in California

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
As a software engineer on the Scaling team, you'll help build and optimize the low-level stack that orchestrates computation and data movement across OpenAI's supercomputing clusters. Your work will involve designing high-performance runtimes, building custom kernels, contributing to compiler infrastructure, and developing scalable simulation systems to validate and optimize distributed training workloads.
You will work at the intersection of systems programming, ML infrastructure, and high-performance computing, helping to create both ergonomic developer APIs and highly efficient runtime systems. This means balancing ease of use and introspection with the need for stability and performance on our evolving hardware fleet.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid work model (3 days/week in-office). Relocation assistance is available.
In this role, you will:

• Design and build APIs and runtime components to orchestrate computation and data movement across heterogeneous ML workloads.
• Contribute to compiler infrastructure, including the development of optimizations and compiler passes to support evolving hardware.
• Engineer and optimize compute and data kernels, ensuring correctness, high performance, and portability across simulation and production environments.
• Profile and optimize system bottlenecks, especially around I/O, memory hierarchy, and interconnects, at both local and distributed scales.
• Develop simulation infrastructure to validate runtime behaviors, test training stack changes, and support early-stage hardware and system development.
• Rapidly deploy runtime and compiler updates to new supercomputing builds in close collaboration with hardware and research teams.
• Work across a diverse stack, primarily using Rust and Python, with opportunities to influence architecture decisions across the training framework.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a deep curiosity for how large-scale systems work and enjoy making them faster, simpler, and more reliable.
• Are proficient in systems programming (e.g., Rust, C++) and scripting languages like Python.
• Have experience in one or more of the following areas: compiler development, kernel authoring, accelerator programming, runtime systems, distributed systems, or high-performance simulation.
• Are excited to work in a fast-paced, highly collaborative environment with evolving hardware and ML system demands.
• Value engineering excellence, technical leadership, and thoughtful system design.

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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