Lead RTL Design Engineer

Key Responsibilities

• Microarchitecture definition (core focus): Own the design and definition of processor and compute-unit microarchitecture, including dataflow pipelines, execution units, and interfaces. Set performance, power, and area targets, and guide the team toward achieving them.
• On-chip interconnects and system integration: Define and drive the design of on-chip networks and data movement across the fabric, balancing performance, scalability, and implementation constraints in collaboration with physical design.
• Memory subsystem & system architecture: Define the interface to the memory subsystem, including data movement, ordering, and synchronization behavior, ensuring a clean and scalable model for software and future system expansion.
• Reconfiguration and execution model: Lead the architecture of configuration, scheduling, and execution of workloads on the fabric, including multi-kernel support and interaction with host systems.
• Power management and low-power design: Drive power architecture across the design, including clocking, reset, power domains, and low-power strategies to meet aggressive energy and efficiency goals.
• HW/SW co-design: Collaborate closely with compiler and software teams to define the hardware execution model, ensuring efficient mapping of workloads onto the architecture.

Additional information

Specifications, Documentations and Reviews: Author and own uArch specification documents for assigned blocks; drive design reviews with architecture, compiler, DV, and physical design stakeholders.

• Mentoring and process improvement: Mentor senior and junior RTL engineers; review RTL, flag microarchitecture risks, and enforce coding style and lint-clean standards across the team.
• Driving PPA Metrics: Participate in PPA analysis loops: synthesize blocks regularly, review area/timing/power reports, and make data-driven tradeoffs against performance and feature requirements.
• DV Collaboration: Collaborate with DV leads to define/review verification plans; provide directed test scenarios for graph execution corner cases, back-pressure conditions, and power state transitions.
• Silicon Bring-up: Support silicon bring-up: contribute scan/ATPG guidelines, review DFT insertion, and provide RTL-level debug assistance during lab validation.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• 8+ years of RTL design experience with tape-out ownership of dataflow based design, on chip networks, memory subsystems or peripheral integration on a processor or accelerator SoC.
• Deep proficiency in SystemVerilog for RTL - synthesis-clean, lint-clean, timing-aware; able to design complex state machines, arbiters, token flow controllers, and datapath logic from scratch.
• Solid understanding of parallel execution models: dataflow, SIMD, or systolic array architectures; familiarity with the hardware challenges of token-based firing-rule evaluation and producer-consumer synchronization.
• Hands-on experience with on-chip memory design: SRAM wrappers, scratchpad/TCM, banking, and memory-mapped register interfaces.
• Experience with low-power RTL techniques: UPF-driven flows, clock gating, power domains, retention registers, and AON wakeup logic.
• Familiarity with at least one standard on-chip bus protocol (AXI, AHB, APB, TileLink, or NoC equivalent) at the RTL implementation level.
• Experience taking RTL through synthesis and timing closure; ability to read and act on SDC constraints, STA reports, and synthesis QoR summaries.
• Strong written communication skills; able to produce uArch specs and design review material independently.
• Experience with memory compiler toolchains

Desired Qualifications & Experience Requirements

• Prior RTL ownership of a dataflow engine, neural processing unit (NPU), or streaming DSP architecture with explicit producer-consumer token management.
• Experience collaborating with compiler or graph-optimization teams to co-design hardware execution models and graph IR representations.
• Familiarity with NVM controller RTL (MRAM, RRAM) including ECC, program/erase sequencing, and model weight storage use cases.
• Experience with IoT-class power budgets (sub-10 mW active, sub-100 µW standby) and the RTL design choices they necessitate.
• Familiarity with functional safety standards (ISO 26262, IEC 61508) as applied to execution fabric error detection and power domain isolation.
• Exposure to AI framework graph formats (ONNX, TFLite) and understanding of how graph compilation maps to hardware execution primitives.
• Tape-out credits on an edge-AI, IoT, or wearable SoC at 12nm or below.
• Experience with formal verification of flow-control logic, deadlock freedom, or bus protocol compliance.

Pay and benefits

We offer a competitive base salary for this role, generally ranging from $200,000 to $275,000, plus a 10% annual bonus, meaningful equity, and comprehensive benefits. Final compensation will depend on experience, level, and location, with flexibility for the right candidate.