---
title: 'Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/physical-design-engineer-forward-deployed-engineering-openai-san-francisco-qqh4c31zzvj5'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $260k–$302k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/18d65004-a399-4a33-80bc-10f33bff2ed0

## 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 improve engineering workflows and accelerate innovation. Our work turns early, high-touch deployments into repeatable solution patterns, reference architectures, and evaluation practices that scale across the semiconductor ecosystem.

## About the Role

We are seeking a highly skilled Physical Design Engineer to join our semiconductor-focused Forward Deployed Engineering team. This is a senior IC role that will begin with a strong emphasis on physical design expertise, technical judgment, advisory leverage, and customer credibility, 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 the team’s physical design SME across semiconductor deployments: helping FDEs, Product, and Research understand backend implementation workflows, pressure-test AI-assisted solution ideas against real physical design constraints, and raise the quality of our customer-facing technical work. You will help the broader team build fluency in implementation flows, EDA tooling, signoff methodology, and the trade-offs that shape physical design decisions in practice. 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 physical design 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 physical design SME for semiconductor customer engagements, helping FDE teams understand backend implementation workflows, constraints, and opportunities
- 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
- Help shape AI-assisted solutions across physical design workflows, including floorplanning, place and route, clocking, timing closure, congestion, power, physical verification, and signoff
- Guide feasibility and integration decisions across the entire chip design lifecycle: design, verification, and physical design
- Partner with FDEs and customer SMEs to curate evaluation datasets, golden tasks, rubrics, and acceptance criteria for physical design use cases, ensuring evals reflect real workflows and meaningful success metrics
- Build or guide lightweight prototypes, benchmarks, methodology experiments, and internal tools that validate opportunities and accelerate solution development
- Educate and mentor the broader FDE team on physical design concepts, implementation flows, EDA tooling, and key trade-offs so the org can engage customers with greater depth and confidence
- Surface repeated customer signal to Product and Research to help shape roadmap, model behavior, and platform capabilities for semiconductor use cases
- Progressively take on broader FDE responsibilities, including customer discovery, solution architecture, prototype development, production deployment, and ownership of technical workstreams

## Minimum Qualifications

- BS with 7+ years, MS with 5+ years, or equivalent industry experience in physical design, physical implementation, or backend signoff for complex ASIC or SoC programs
- Demonstrated success bringing complex designs through tapeout, with hands-on experience in floorplanning, place and route, CTS, timing closure, power analysis, physical verification, and signoff
- Deep familiarity with industry-standard EDA tools and flows for synthesis, PNR, STA, physical verification, equivalence checking, and power analysis
- Strong understanding of how physical design intersects with microarchitecture, RTL, verification, design methodology, libraries/PDKs, and system-level PPA trade-offs
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to translate deep technical trade-offs clearly in customer-facing and cross-functional settings
- Comfortable operating as a consultative expert and advisor — unblocking teams, shaping decisions, and raising technical quality without necessarily being the direct implementation owner
- Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Tcl, or similar
- 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 working across multiple semiconductor companies, design environments, or tool stacks, with a point of view shaped by different engineering cultures and methodologies
- Experience partnering with external customers, strategic accounts, or design partners in a technical advisory capacity
- Experience defining or scaling evaluation workflows, benchmarks, or acceptance criteria
- Exposure to adjacent workflows such as design and/or verification
- Experience applying AI/LLM systems to semiconductor workflows
- Prior experience in solutions engineering, field engineering, customer-facing technical delivery, or consultative technical 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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