About the job
We’re seeking a Research-Hardware Codesign Engineer to operate at the boundary between model research and silicon/system architecture. You’ll help shape the numerics, architecture, and technology bets of future OpenAI silicon in collaboration with both Research and Hardware.
Responsibilities
Build on our roofline simulator to track evolving workloads, and deliver analyses that quantify the impact of system architecture decisions and support technology pathfinding.
Debug gaps between performance simulation and real measurements; clearly communicate root cause, bottlenecks, and invalid assumptions.
Write emulation kernels for low-precision numerics and lossy compression schemes, and get Research the information they need to trade efficiency with model quality.
Prototype numerics modules by pushing RTL through synthesis; hand off novel numerics cleanly, or occasionally own an RTL module end-to-end.
Proactively pull in new ML workloads, prototype them with rooflines and/or functional simulation, and drive initial evaluation of new opportunities or risks.
Understand the whole picture from ML science to hardware optimization, and slice this end-to-end objective into near-term deliverables.
Build ad-hoc collaborations across teams with very different goals and areas of expertise, and keep progress unblocked.
Communicate design tradeoffs clearly with explicit assumptions and confidence levels; produce a trail of evidence that enables confident execution.
Qualifications
Minimum
An exceptional track record of high-quality technical output, and a bias for shipping a prototype now and iterating later in the absence of clear requirements.
Strong Python, and C++ or Rust, with a cautious attitude toward correctness and an intuition for clean extensibility.
Experience writing Triton, CUDA, or similar, and an understanding of the resulting mapping of tensor ops to functional units.
Working knowledge of PyTorch or JAX; experience in large ML codebases is a plus.
Practical understanding of floating point numerics, the ML tradeoffs of reduced precision, and the current state of the art in model quantization.
Deep understanding of transformer models, and strong intuition for transformer rooflines and the tradeoffs of sharded training and inference in large-scale ML systems.
Strong cross-functional communication (e.g. across ML researchers and hardware engineers); ability to slice ambiguous early-incubation ideas into concrete arenas in which progress can be made.
Preferred
Experience writing RTL (especially for floating point logic) and understanding of PPA tradeoffs is a plus.