About this role
About the Role
Lead silicon design for an AI accelerator, guiding development from FPGA prototype through ASIC tapeout and bring-up. As a founding member of a small silicon team, you will set technical direction and collaborate with PCB, interconnect, software, and systems teams to deliver the accelerator.
What You'll Do
- Develop and optimize FPGA prototypes, taking designs from specification to working hardware.
- Design and review synthesizable RTL for the first ASIC, with a focus on clean microarchitecture.
- Build and maintain lint, simulation, synthesis, timing, and verification flows for rapid iteration and tapeout readiness.
- Make architecture decisions across compute datapaths, memory systems, on-chip interconnect, and control logic.
- Drive design through tapeout, bring-up, and delivery milestones.
- Help grow and mentor the silicon team.
What We're Looking For
- At least 8 years of experience in digital design or silicon engineering, building RTL, FPGA prototypes, or ASICs.
- Experience shipping synthesizable SystemVerilog or Verilog and taking FPGA designs through synthesis, place-and-route, and deployment to working hardware.
- Strong digital design fundamentals, including pipelining, clocks, resets, latency, throughput, and microarchitecture.
- Experience designing compute datapaths and memory systems with bandwidth and latency constraints in mind.
- Familiarity with simulation, linting, synthesis, SDC constraints, timing closure, and CDC verification.
- Experience automating hardware flows with Python, Tcl, Make, Nix, or similar tools.
- Background in AI accelerators or low-level AI kernels. Tapeout, high-speed interface, formal verification, UVM, cocotb, firmware, or systems-level hardware validation experience is also valuable.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
Location
On-site, full-time in San Francisco, United States. This role is not remote or hybrid.