Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the TeamOpenAI’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 RoleWe 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 opportunitiesPartner with FDEs during customer discovery and scoping to translate ambiguous pain points into clear solution hypotheses, success criteria, and technical plansSupport customer-facing technical conversations as a trusted advisor, engaging credibly with technical leadersHelp shape AI-assisted solutions across physical design workflows, including floorplanning, place and route, clocking, timing closure, congestion, power, physical verification, and signoffGuide feasibility and integration decisions across the entire chip design lifecycle: design, verification, and physical designPartner 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 metricsBuild or guide lightweight prototypes, benchmarks, methodology experiments, and internal tools that validate opportunities and accelerate solution developmentEducate 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 confidenceSurface repeated customer signal to Product and Research to help shape roadmap, model behavior, and platform capabilities for semiconductor use casesProgressively take on broader FDE responsibilities, including customer discovery, solution architecture, prototype development, production deployment, and ownership of technical workstreamsMinimum QualificationsBS with 7+ years, MS with 5+ years, or equivalent industry experience in physical design, physical implementation, or backend signoff for complex ASIC or SoC programsDemonstrated success bringing complex designs through tapeout, with hands-on experience in floorplanning, place and route, CTS, timing closure, power analysis, physical verification, and signoffDeep familiarity with industry-standard EDA tools and flows for synthesis, PNR, STA, physical verification, equivalence checking, and power analysisStrong understanding of how physical design intersects with microarchitecture, RTL, verification, design methodology, libraries/PDKs, and system-level PPA trade-offsStrong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to translate deep technical trade-offs clearly in customer-facing and cross-functional settingsComfortable operating as a consultative expert and advisor — unblocking teams, shaping decisions, and raising technical quality without necessarily being the direct implementation ownerStrong scripting and automation skills in Python, Tcl, or similarExcited 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 outcomesPreferred QualificationsExperience working across multiple semiconductor companies, design environments, or tool stacks, with a point of view shaped by different engineering cultures and methodologiesExperience partnering with external customers, strategic accounts, or design partners in a technical advisory capacityExperience defining or scaling evaluation workflows, benchmarks, or acceptance criteriaExposure to adjacent workflows such as design and/or verificationExperience applying AI/LLM systems to semiconductor workflowsPrior experience in solutions engineering, field engineering, customer-facing technical delivery, or consultative technical rolesAbout OpenAIOpenAI 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