--- title: 'RTL Design Engineer – Interconnect & Network Datapath at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/rtl-design-engineer-interconnect-network-datapath-openai-san-francisco-yk1a6tg37vkf' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-10' --- # RTL Design Engineer – Interconnect & Network Datapath at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $225k–$445k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-06-23 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/6cf91ff5-a811-435c-bf93-f3d958896599/application **Skills:** Verilog, SystemVerilog, RTL Design, SoC Interconnect, NoC, Coherent Fabric, Memory Subsystem, Cache-Coherent, Chip-level Integration, AXI, APB, CXL, PCIe, Ethernet, RDMA, RoCE, HPC-style System-level Interconnects, Lint, CDC/RDC, Synthesis > Own the microarchitecture and RTL design of critical on- and off-chip interconnect components for custom AI accelerator platforms. Drive design from requirements through silicon lifecycle, including verification, physical design convergence, and production readiness, while mentoring junior engineers and collaboratin... ## Job description ## About the Team OpenAI’s Hardware organization develops AI-native silicon and system-level solutions for the unique demands of advanced AI workloads. Building on efforts like Jalapeño, the team is developing future generations of AI-native silicon and tightly integrated systems to power the next generation of frontier models. By co-designing chips, systems, tools, and methodologies, the team helps deliver faster, more efficient, and production-ready hardware for OpenAI’s supercomputing platform. ## About the Role We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on RTL engineer with deep packet-networking and interconnect expertise to own critical on- and off-chip communication components for our custom AI accelerator platform. You will drive the microarchitecture and RTL implementation of scalable on-chip fabrics connecting high-bandwidth compute, memory, and I/O subsystems, as well as purpose-built off-chip interfaces and protocols that enable custom computing at scale. The ideal candidate has recently owned production RTL for networking or packet-switched datapaths such as Ethernet switches, NICs, SmartNICs, network accelerators, RDMA/RoCE systems, NoCs, or custom scale-up/scale-out fabrics. This is a senior engineering role with broad technical ownership and substantial direct RTL work. You will drive designs from requirements and performance analysis through microarchitecture, SystemVerilog implementation, verification closure, physical design convergence, silicon bring-up, and production readiness. You will also plan and oversee the work of junior engineers and help develop productive engineering relationships with external partners. In this role, you will: - Own the microarchitecture, RTL design, and delivery of major packet-based interconnect and networking components, including NoC fabrics, switches, routers, bridges, protocol adapters, arbiters, queues, schedulers, buffers, and traffic-management logic. - Design mechanisms for routing, arbitration, ordering, flow control, congestion management, quality of service, packet scheduling, buffering, and performance monitoring. - Develop on-chip and off-chip interfaces, protocol bridges, and custom networking protocols or protocol extensions for scale-up and scale-out systems. - Perform substantial direct microarchitecture, SystemVerilog coding, simulation, and debug work. - Collaborate with architecture and performance teams to analyze traffic patterns, identify bottlenecks, and optimize latency, bandwidth, fairness, and utilization under realistic workloads. - Work with verification teams to develop coverage plans, assertions, stress scenarios, and debug strategies for highly concurrent packet and fabric behavior. - Partner with physical design teams on floorplan-aware design, pipeline strategy, timing closure, power, area, and physical congestion. - Collaborate with firmware, software, validation, and post-silicon teams through bring-up and production readiness. - Drive third-party engagements involving networking, interface protocols, and silicon IP while maintaining design quality and execution accountability. - Provide technical leadership through architecture and design reviews, documentation, mentoring, and reusable RTL methodologies. You might thrive in this role if you have: - Extensive industry experience with recent, hands-on ownership of complex networking, packet-processing, or packet-switched interconnect RTL. - Demonstrated networking expertise in one or more of the following: Ethernet switching, NIC/SmartNIC/DPU datapaths, network accelerators, RDMA/RoCE, InfiniBand, traffic management, or custom scale-up/scale-out transports. - Deep expertise in Verilog/SystemVerilog and the development of clean, parameterized, production-quality RTL. - A strong record of owning major RTL blocks or SoC subsystems from requirements and microarchitecture through tape-out and silicon bring-up. - Experience designing queues, arbiters, schedulers, buffers, routing logic, virtual channels, credit-based flow control, congestion management, quality of service, ordering, or deadlock-avoidance mechanisms. - Experience with relevant on-chip, chip-to-chip, or host interfaces such as AXI, CHI, CXL, PCIe, or Ethernet, alongside deeper networking or packet-datapath expertise. - Experience designing custom networking protocols, protocol extensions, or hardware datapaths for large-scale RDMA/RoCE, HPC, or AI systems. - Strong familiarity with RTL development and signoff flows, including lint, CDC/RDC, synthesis, formal verification, static timing analysis, power analysis, and design-for-test considerations. - Experience collaborating with architecture, verification, physical design, firmware, performance, and post-silicon teams to deliver complex silicon. - Strong judgment when balancing performance, power, area, schedule, verification risk, and physical implementation constraints. - The ability to provide technical direction, mentor engineers, and drive alignment while remaining actively involved in RTL design and debugging. - A passion for reducing complexity and improving engineering leverage through automation and pragmatic design. ## Preferred Qualifications - Experience designing packet-switched interconnect or networking datapaths for AI accelerators, GPUs, CPUs, HPC systems, NICs/SmartNICs, switch ASICs, or large-scale datacenter silicon. - Experience addressing virtualization, isolation, RAS, telemetry, security, or memory-consistency requirements within complex networking or interconnect subsystems. - Experience with network or NoC performance modeling, traffic simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, or post-silicon traffic and performance analysis. - Experience leading architecture or RTL delivery for first-generation networking or interconnect IP in rapidly evolving silicon programs. 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](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. 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