About this role
About the Role
As a founding silicon team member at a well-funded AI accelerator startup, you will lead the full journey of a custom XPU from FPGA prototype through tapeout and bring-up. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role that sets technical direction across architecture, RTL, verification, and tooling while the silicon organization grows around you.
What You'll Do
- Lead FPGA prototype development and optimization of the XPU, taking designs from specification to working silicon.
- Design and review RTL destined for the first ASIC, ensuring clean microarchitecture and synthesizable code.
- Build lint, simulation, synthesis, timing, and verification flows to support rapid iteration and tapeout readiness.
- Make architecture decisions spanning compute datapaths, memory systems, on-chip interconnect, and control logic.
- Drive the design through tapeout, bring-up, and delivery milestones, including critical-sprint periods.
- Grow and mentor the silicon team as the company scales.
What We're Looking For
- 8 or more years of hands-on digital design or silicon engineering experience building RTL, FPGA prototypes, or ASICs.
- Proven ability to ship synthesizable SystemVerilog or Verilog in production silicon or FPGA designs.
- End-to-end FPGA experience: RTL through synthesis, place-and-route, and deployment to working hardware.
- Strong fundamentals in pipelining, clocks, resets, latency, throughput, and microarchitecture.
- Fluency with simulation, linting, synthesis, SDC constraints, timing closure, and CDC verification flows.
- Experience automating hardware flows using Python, Tcl, Make, Nix, or similar tools.
- Background designing or optimizing AI accelerators or low-level AI kernel implementations.
- Tapeout experience, high-speed interface design, formal verification, UVM, cocotb, firmware, or systems programming are strong advantages.
- Self-directed, comfortable with ownership, and energized by fast-moving environments.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 USD annually , plus equity. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
Full-time, on-site in San Francisco, CA . This role is not remote or hybrid.