Senior Silicon Engineer

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.