物理设计工程师，前向部署工程
Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering
团队简介
OpenAI的前向部署工程团队与领先的半导体公司合作，将生产级AI系统部署到整个芯片设计生命周期中：设计、验证和物理设计。我们处于客户交付与核心平台开发的交汇点，深入客户内部，将前沿模型能力转化为显著提升工程工作流程并加速创新的系统。
我们的工作将早期的高接触部署转化为可重复使用的解决方案模式、参考架构和评估实践，从而在整个半导体生态系统中实现扩展。
职位简介
我们正在寻找一位技术精湛的物理设计工程师加入我们专注于半导体的前向部署工程团队。这是一个高级IC职位，初期将重点放在物理设计专业知识、技术判断力、咨询影响力和客户可信度上，期望该职位持有者随着时间推移成长为更广泛的前向部署工程角色。
短期内，你将成为半导体部署中物理设计的专家：帮助FDE团队、产品和研究团队理解后端实现流程，对AI辅助解决方案想法进行真实物理设计约束的压力测试，并提高我们面向客户的工程技术质量。你将帮助整个团队建立对实现流程、EDA工具、签核方法以及实际物理设计决策中所涉及权衡的理解。
随着时间推移，我们期望这个职位从专家支持扩展到更广泛的FDE职责：直接与客户合作，制定部署策略，构建和迭代生产级AI系统，推动技术工作流，并帮助将高接触的半导体部署转化为可重复的解决方案。
这是一个适合当前具备深厚物理设计专业知识，并期待成长为面向客户、系统构建和交付导向的FDE角色的人选。
在该职位中，你将：
- 作为半导体客户项目的物理设计专家，帮助FDE团队理解后端实现流程、约束和机会
- 在客户发现和范围定义过程中与FDE合作，将模糊的痛点转化为明确的解决方案假设、成功标准和技术计划
- 作为值得信赖的顾问参与面向客户的工程技术对话，以可信的方式进行交流
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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
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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.
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