Physical Design Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering

Responsibilities

• Serve as the physical design subject-matter expert for semiconductor customer engagements, advising on backend implementation workflows, constraints, and opportunities.
• Partner on customer discovery and scoping to define solution hypotheses, success criteria, and technical plans.
• Support customer-facing technical conversations as a trusted advisor.
• Shape AI-assisted solutions for floorplanning, place and route, clocking, timing closure, congestion, power, physical verification, and signoff.
• Guide feasibility and integration decisions across chip design, verification, and physical design.
• Curate evaluation datasets, golden tasks, rubrics, and acceptance criteria for physical design use cases.
• Build or guide prototypes, benchmarks, methodology experiments, and internal tools.
• Educate and mentor the broader team on physical design concepts, implementation flows, EDA tooling, and trade-offs.
• Surface customer feedback to Product and Research to inform roadmap, model behavior, and platform capabilities.
• Progressively take on customer discovery, solution architecture, prototype development, production deployment, and technical workstream ownership.

Requirements

• BS with 7+ years, MS with 5+ years, or equivalent industry experience in physical design, physical implementation, or backend signoff for complex ASIC or SoC programs.
• Demonstrated success bringing complex designs through tapeout.
• Hands-on experience with floorplanning, place and route, clock-tree synthesis, timing closure, power analysis, physical verification, and signoff.
• Deep familiarity with EDA tools and flows for synthesis, place and route, static timing analysis, physical verification, equivalence checking, and power analysis.
• Strong understanding of physical design interactions with microarchitecture, RTL, verification, design methodology, libraries/PDKs, and system-level PPA trade-offs.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills for customer-facing and cross-functional technical work.
• Ability to operate as a consultative expert and advisor.
• Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Tcl, or similar.
• Willingness to grow into broader Forward Deployed Engineering responsibilities, including hands-on solution building and customer-facing delivery.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience across multiple semiconductor companies, design environments, or tool stacks.
• Experience with external customers, strategic accounts, or design partners in a technical advisory capacity.
• Experience defining or scaling evaluation workflows, benchmarks, or acceptance criteria.
• Exposure to adjacent design or verification workflows.
• Experience applying AI or LLM systems to semiconductor workflows.
• Experience in solutions engineering, field engineering, customer-facing technical delivery, or consultative technical roles.

Compensation

• Annual salary: $260,000–$302,000