Forward Deployed Engineer - Semiconductor

📋 Description

• • As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at OpenAI, you will be at the forefront of integrating cutting-edge AI models into the complex and critical workflows of leading semiconductor companies. This role is a unique blend of customer-facing engagement and deep technical problem-solving, operating at the intersection of advanced AI research and practical, production-grade deployment.
• • You will partner directly with semiconductor industry experts – including hardware architects, RTL designers, verification engineers, and performance specialists – to understand their intricate processes, massive codebases, and lengthy toolchains. Your primary objective will be to translate these complex engineering challenges into effective, AI-powered solutions that demonstrably reduce design cycles, enhance verification quality, and accelerate overall innovation.
• • This position demands a comprehensive understanding of the entire semiconductor lifecycle, from initial chip design and verification through to tooling and manufacturing-adjacent systems. You will play a pivotal role in expanding OpenAI's influence across this entire spectrum, fundamentally shaping how state-of-the-art AI models are applied throughout the semiconductor development process.
• • Success in this role will be measured by tangible outcomes: the successful adoption of AI systems in production environments, significant reductions in engineering cycle times, measurable gains in engineer productivity, and the establishment of robust, evaluation-driven feedback loops. These insights will be crucial in informing and refining OpenAI's product, model, and platform strategies.
• • You will collaborate closely with internal teams, including Product, Research, Go-to-Market (GTM), and Partnerships, to transform initial high-touch customer engagements into scalable, repeatable solution patterns, robust reference architectures, and standardized evaluation practices. This will help build a durable and impactful vertical offering for the semiconductor industry.
• • The environments you will operate in are characterized by an absolute requirement for correctness, scalability, and trustworthiness. In chip design and verification, even minor regressions can lead to weeks of delays, and critical failures can halt the entire tape-out process. Therefore, technical rigor and a deep understanding of the stakes are paramount to earning and maintaining credibility.
• • Your responsibilities will encompass the end-to-end design and deployment of AI systems. This includes owning the integration of OpenAI's models with critical customer infrastructure such as RTL repositories, sophisticated verification environments, industry-standard simulators, and internal development tooling.
• • You will lead the entire engagement lifecycle, from initial discovery and scoping through to full production rollout. This involves expertly translating ambiguous engineering pain points into well-defined, hypothesis-driven use cases with clearly measurable outcomes.
• • A key focus will be on delivering AI-powered verification workflows. This includes implementing advanced capabilities like change-aware test selection, intelligent directed test generation, and sophisticated regression triage systems, guiding them from initial prototype stages to reliable daily production use.
• • You will architect and build systems capable of processing and operating over vast, continuously evolving codebases and artifacts. This includes RTL code, test suites, simulation logs, waveform data, and trace files, where performance, latency, and robust failure handling are critical architectural considerations.
• • You will be responsible for defining and executing rigorous evaluation loops. These loops will meticulously measure the quality of both the AI models and the integrated systems against specific workflow benchmarks, such as code coverage improvements, reduction in false positives, decreased debug time, and overall iteration speed enhancement.
• • You will manage the delivery state across multiple concurrent workstreams, making strategic trade-offs between scope, speed of delivery, and system robustness to ensure maximum production impact and customer satisfaction.
• • A vital part of your role will be to distill the learnings from field deployments into hardened, reusable components. This includes creating foundational primitives, comprehensive reference implementations, practical playbooks, and essential tooling that can be leveraged across a wide range of customer engagements.
• • You will act as a crucial conduit for field insights, surfacing valuable feedback that directly informs model behavior improvements, identifies gaps in existing tooling, and shapes the future product direction for AI applications across the entire semiconductor stack.
• • Ultimately, your success will be defined by shipping AI systems that semiconductor engineers trust and rely on in their daily workflows, establishing repeatable and scalable deployment patterns across chip design and verification, and solidifying OpenAI's position as a long-term, indispensable partner within the global semiconductor ecosystem.