Senior Silicon Engineer
clera · San Francisco · onsite
ABOUT THE ROLE
Lead silicon design for an AI accelerator, taking designs from FPGA prototypes through ASIC tapeout and bring-up. As a senior member of a small hardware team, you will shape technical direction across architecture, RTL, verification, and tooling, working closely with PCB, interconnect, software, and systems teams.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Lead FPGA prototype development and optimization, from design specifications through deployment on working hardware.
- Design and review synthesizable RTL for an ASIC, with a focus on clean microarchitecture.
- Build and improve lint, simulation, synthesis, timing, and verification flows for rapid iteration and tapeout readiness.
- Make architecture decisions across compute datapaths, memory systems, on-chip interconnect, and control logic.
- Drive design through tapeout, bring-up, and delivery milestones, contributing hands-on during critical periods.
- Mentor teammates and help grow the silicon engineering team.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- At least 8 years of experience in digital design or silicon engineering, building RTL, FPGA prototypes, or ASICs.
- Experience shipping synthesizable SystemVerilog or Verilog in production silicon or FPGA designs, and taking FPGA designs from RTL through synthesis, place-and-route, and deployment to working hardware.
- Strong understanding of digital design, including pipelining, clocks, resets, latency, throughput, and microarchitecture.
- Experience designing compute datapaths and memory systems with bandwidth and latency constraints.
- Hands-on experience with simulation, linting, synthesis, SDC constraints, timing closure, and CDC verification.
- Experience automating hardware flows with Python, Tcl, Make, Nix, or similar tools, plus background in AI accelerators or low-level AI kernels.
- Tapeout experience, high-speed interfaces, formal verification, UVM, cocotb, firmware, or systems-level hardware drivers are valuable.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary is $200,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available.
LOCATION
Full-time, on-site role in San Francisco, United States. This position is not remote or hybrid.