Physical Design Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About Etched

Etched is building the world’s first AI inference system purpose-built for transformers - delivering over 10x higher performance and dramatically lower cost and latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep & parallel chain-of-thought reasoning agents. Backed by hundreds of millions from top-tier investors and staffed by leading engineers from NVIDIA, Google, and Meta, Etched is redefining the infrastructure layer for the fastest growing industry in history.

Physical Design Engineer

Etched is looking for exceptional PD engineers to join our team. The candidate will be responsible for working with 3rd party design services to implement and verify physical designs, and will help Etched as we work to improve iteration speed on physical design.

Representative projects :

Supervise the outsourcing of physical design to a 3rd party service

Deeply understand what is involved in physical design

Running Physical Design flows to close blocks, support ASIC infrastructure, automate Physical Design flows, improve CAD infrastructure

Drive dashboards that show the convergence of projects related to Physical Design

Optimize tool flows, working with EDA vendors to incorporate the latest features

Accountable for block level closure

Requirements :

2+ years of previous experience with PD

Tools, flow, and design methodology from RTL synthesis to GDSII sign-off

Experience with back-end design and timing closure on 3nm-7nm

Experience with UPF-based low power design methodology, power verification, synthesis, scan insertion / ATPG, formal verification, floorplanning, placement, CTS, routing, IR drop, and EM / antenna analysis

Deeply creative and able to think from first principles

Desired qualifications :

Familiarity with transformer models and machine learning.

Familiarity with Cadence or Synopsys automated RTL-to-GDSII flows

​Ability to program with Python or another scripting language.

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

How we’re different :

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We are a fully in-person team in West San Jose, and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.

Benefits :

Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with generous premium coverage

Housing subsidy of $2,000 / month for those living within walking distance of the office

Daily lunch and dinner in our office

Relocation support for those moving to West San Jose

Compensation Range

$150,000 - $275,000