Graduate Modelling Engineer; Graduate and Early Career

Graduate Modelling Engineer (Graduate and Early Career)

London or Bristol hybrid

GRADUATE MODELLING ENGINEER

Graduate & Early Career
· Pre-Silicon Engineering
· London or Bristol
· Hybrid

Most graduate roles in hardware put you in a queue. You inherit a task, run it through a flow someone else designed, and wait your turn to matter. This is not that.

At Fractile, the modelling team sits upstream of everything — the decisions made here shape the chip before RTL is written, before constraints are locked, before anyone else has a chance to course-correct. That means the work is high-stakes, intellectually demanding, and genuinely consequential from day one.

You will not be on a rotation programme. You will not be sitting in review meetings waiting for your turn to present. You will be contributing to architectural decisions that end up in silicon — working directly alongside engineers who have shipped chips at Arm, Intel, Apple, and Google, in a team small enough that your ideas get heard and your work has a name on it.

About Fractile

Fractile is building silicon, systems and software which will redefine the frontier of AI: running the world's most advanced models at radically higher speed and lower cost. We have an exceptional team across hardware and software capable of bringing about this change, and we are growing fast to meet demand and deliver our product at scale.

The frontier of AI is no longer a research problem. The tasks AI can complete are doubling in complexity every six to seven months, and the tokens required to complete them are scaling with it. Sequential reasoning — the kind that can't be parallelised away — means the internal clock speed of inference systems is the critical constraint. What stands between where we are today and the future potential of AI isn't smarter algorithms;

it's the hardware to run them fast enough to matter.

Today's chips are hitting their wall. We're building the ones that don't.

Founded 2022
· 110+ people and growing
· London & Bristol
· Heart of the UK's frontier AI ecosystem

The Role

This is an early-career role for someone who wants to be at the point where hardware decisions get made — before RTL is written, before a floorplan exists, before the constraints are locked. Pre-silicon modelling is where architecture happens: where the questions are biggest, the trade-offs are hardest, and the answers have the most leverage.

Our ideal candidate has 0–3 years of experience, including recent graduates.

As a Graduate Modelling Engineer you will work within the modelling team, sitting at the intersection of hardware architecture, software systems, and ML inference. You will collaborate closely with colleagues across RTL design, verification, physical design, and system architecture — contributing to the decisions that shape the chip from the earliest stages of development through to tape-out.

We are not looking for someone from one specific background. Whether you come from a software and architecture route, a verification background, or have hands‑on hardware design experience, what matters is that you are curious about how all the pieces fit together and motivated to work at the level where they connect.

At Fractile, we value ideas from everyone, regardless of title or tenure. You will be joining a culture where your curiosity is encouraged, your input matters, and there is real room to grow.

What You'll Do

• Build and run functional and performance models of processor and accelerator microarchitecture, in C++ using System
  
  C.
• Explore architectural trade‑offs — cache sizing, memory bandwidth, datapath design, pipeline structure — and translate the results into clear guidance for the wider team.
• Work with the verification team to develop functional models of hardware blocks that can be used both for simulation and as a reference for RTL checking.
• Learn how ML inference workloads behave at the hardware level and what architectural choices serve them best.
• Contribute to the simulation and tooling infrastructure that the architecture team depends on.
• Engage in architecture discussions and bring the modelling perspective into decisions that span hardware and software.

The Mindset We…