Physical Design Lead - Founding Engineer - Stealth Startup
A fast-growing semiconductor startup working in the AI silicon space is developing an AI-driven chip-design platform. The team combines deep expertise across AI, semiconductor architecture, physical design and chip development, with a focus on building highly automated approaches to custom silicon development.
They're looking for an engineering leader to drive physical implementation for custom ASICs. This is an end-to-end technical leadership role setting up architecture, collaborating with the wider team and eventually building out your own too.
Core Responsibilities
- Lead deployment of AI-driven design-optimisation engines to automate macro placement, optimise clock and power distribution networks, and maximise PPA.
- Address physical-design challenges associated with AI workloads, including dynamic IR-drop, thermal-density mitigation and multi-GHz clock-tree synthesis.
- Own end-to-end physical implementation across custom ASICs.
- Build and grow out a team, serving as a technical lead.
Required Qualifications
- 5–10 years of physical-design experience, with a track record of taking complex, large-die SoCs or compute subsystems through tape-out.
- Hands-on experience integrating AI-enabled design-optimisation tools into production implementation flows.
- Strong AI literacy within the implementation workflow, particularly optimisations relevant to EDA and layout density.
- Proven expertise in physical sign-off, including STA, DRC, LVS and EM/IR on advanced process nodes.
This is one of the most unique and in-demand roles going at the moment - if you're interested, Apply today!
