John Wright
Member Of Technical Staff at OpenAI
Oakland, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Wright is a Member of Technical Staff and SoC architect with 11 years designing advanced systems-on-chip and custom digital circuits for consumer and research products, now working at OpenAI after leading chip teams at Amazon Lab126. He has deep hands-on experience across finFET and FDSOI nodes, ML/CV accelerators, RISC-V and Arm subsystems, and has driven IP and tapeout delivery from design through bring-up. An active contributor to prominent open-source hardware projects like Rocket Chip and Chipyard, he’s improved backend Chisel configurations, system control register handling, and build automation including SPI flash support and CI enhancements. Based in Oakland, he pairs a PhD-level academic background with pragmatic engineering—often fixing brittle build and init scripts to make complex toolchains usable outside repository roots. His blend of chip-architecture leadership and low-level build/release craftsmanship makes him adept at taking silicon from concept to production-ready platforms.
11 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, BerkeleyBachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Kentucky
English, French, Vietnamese
Github Skills (24)
system-configuration10
risc-v10
server-configuration10
generator10
hardware10
cicd10
scala10
build-engine10
automation10
chisel10
rt10
chip810
configurations10
automations10
build-tools10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
ucb-bar/chipyard
Jan 2019 - Aug 2021
An Agile RISC-V SoC Design Framework with in-order cores, out-of-order cores, accelerators, and more
Role in this project:
Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:6 reviews, 44 commits, 28 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving the build and setup process of the Chipyard framework. They added configurations and scripts for SPI flash support, including CI tests and documentation updates. Furthermore, the user modified initialization scripts to function correctly outside the repository root and added checks for git version, enhancing the project's usability. These changes involved modifying build configurations, updating scripts, and creating new tests and documentation files.
rtlout-of-orderhardware-designsvlsicomputer-engineering
chipsalliance/rocket-chip
Feb 2016 - May 2020
Rocket Chip Generator
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:16 commits, 8 PRs, 4 pushes in 4 years 3 months
Contributions summary:John primarily contributed to the backend aspects of the Rocket Chip Generator, focusing on system-level configurations and hardware description language (Chisel) code. Their commits involve adding parameters for system control registers (SCR), modifying and extending existing SCR functionality, and improving the structure and usability of SCR-related code. They also made improvements to plusarg handling and debugging outputs within the Rocket Chip project.
rtlriscvchipchiselscala
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.