Physical Design Engineer

About the role

We are a startup building foundational technology to address performance, scalability, and resiliency challenges in large-scale AI data center clusters. We are backed by top-tier VC firms and notable angel investors. The company is led by experienced builders and operators who have founded companies, taken them to scale, and exited successfully. We work with a strong sense of unity and shared responsibility, and we expect trust, integrity, and respect in how we collaborate and make decisions. We hold ourselves accountable to one another and to the quality of the work we deliver. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we operate across a mix of remote and on-site locations in the U.S. and Canada. We aim to create an environment where people are treated fairly, supported in their growth, and are empowered to do meaningful work alongside others who take the craft seriously.

We are looking for a Principal Physical Design Engineer to serve as an early member of our physical design team. You will own some of the most challenging physical implementation problems in the design, drive critical blocks and top-level integration, and help establish the methodologies required to achieve performance, power, area, and schedule targets. This is a deeply hands-on role for an engineer who can independently take complex designs from floorplan through signoff, solve difficult timing and implementation problems, and provide technical leadership across the broader physical design team.

Responsibilities

• Own physical implementation of complex blocks and subsystems from synthesized netlist through signoff.
• Develop floorplans considering hierarchy, macros, interfaces, congestion, timing, power, and routability.
• Develop and optimize power-grid implementations and support IR-drop and electromigration closure.
• Drive placement, optimization, clock-tree synthesis, routing, extraction, timing closure, and ECO implementation.
• Own difficult setup, hold, signal-integrity, congestion, and physical implementation problems.
• Lead timing closure across block boundaries and support top-level timing convergence.
• Perform and drive static timing analysis across multiple modes and corners.
• Support signal-integrity analysis and timing impact from crosstalk, variation, and physical effects.
• Drive physical signoff, including DRC, LVS, antenna, density, connectivity, and related physical verification requirements.
• Perform or support power integrity analysis, including static and dynamic IR drop and electromigration.
• Develop implementation strategies for high-performance and physically challenging portions of the design.
• Partner with RTL and architecture teams to identify implementation problems early and recommend architectural or logical changes where appropriate.
• Work closely with DFT, verification, package, SI/PI, and other engineering teams to resolve cross-functional design issues.
• Develop and improve physical design flows, scripts, automation, metrics, and methodologies.
• Evaluate implementation results and identify opportunities to improve PPA, runtime, convergence, and design quality.
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other physical design engineers.
• Participate in design reviews, methodology reviews, and tapeout readiness assessments.