Rack-Scale AI Hardware Architect

About the role

Mythic builds AI compute platforms around large numbers of small, energy‑efficient accelerators. The System Architect will own the rack‑level reference design for these platforms, leading rack and platform pathfinding across board and chassis layout, scale‑up and scale‑out fabric topology, connector and cable plant, power delivery, and cooling required at high rack densities. The role sits at the intersection of electrical, mechanical, and software engineering, working with the software team to translate model partitioning and inter‑layer traffic into fabric, memory, and topology requirements, and delivering an architecture that differs from today’s GPU racks while delivering comparable rack‑level performance.

Responsibilities

• Define rack‑level reference architecture — board, chassis, backplane, rack topology, mechanical envelope, physical constraints, and serviceability — from pathfinding through a working reference implementation.
• Design scale‑up and scale‑out interconnect: PCIe hierarchy and switching, high‑speed Ethernet and SerDes, die‑to‑die and board‑level links, copper versus optical at each tier, retimers, connectors and cable plant, topology, oversubscription, and bandwidth/latency budget for each hop.
• Develop thermal architecture for high‑density racks: direct‑to‑chip and cold‑plate cooling versus immersion, CDUs and manifolds, flow and pressure budgets, component thermal limits, and rack‑to‑facility interface.
• Architect power delivery, including rack distribution and busbar design, high‑voltage DC and 48V‑class conversion and efficiency, transient behavior across very large device counts, redundancy, telemetry, and RAS.
• Perform joint modeling with the software team of the full LLM solution — partitioning strategy, inter‑layer traffic, collectives — translated into fabric, memory, and topology requirements, backed by quantitative rack‑ and cluster‑level models of performance, power, thermal, and cost.
• Validate designs with measured data, ensure headroom for next device generation, and produce documented power, cooling, weight, and service requirements for real‑world deployment.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• Relevant experience in server, datacenter, HPC, or AI system design.
• Demonstrated architecture and design ownership of dense, rack‑based server systems taken to production, including authoring specifications that ODM and OEM partners build against.
• Expert command of state‑of‑the‑art copper and optical interconnect: PCIe, high‑speed Ethernet and SerDes, DAC and twinax, backplane and cabled channels, AOCs, and pluggable or co‑packaged optics, with signal‑integrity judgment to know where each approach stops working.
• Expert command of removing heat from racks: cooling architecture, cold plates, manifolds, CDUs, flow and thermal budgeting, and facility‑side interface.