Thermodynamic Hardware Resident

Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world, in partnership with the world's most advanced institutions. We work as one team across New York City, Silicon Valley (Mountain View), London, Copenhagen, and Seoul.

The Thermodynamic Hardware Residency is Normal Computing's flagship program for exceptional researchers and engineers who want to work at the frontier of unconventional computing. Residents join a small, hand-picked cohort with a dedicated research mentor, direct access to the team building our cutting-edge thermodynamic hardware, and a clear arc from onboarding through publication.

Every residency is built around two milestones that mark you as part of something bigger than a single project: a research paper co-authored with our team, and a company-wide research colloquium where you present your findings to the full Normal Computing organization. You'll leave with a body of published, presented work, and a standing as one of the earliest residents to help define what this program becomes.

Exceptional performers will be considered for full-time conversion at the end of the residency.

• You'll spend your residency embedded with the team building and characterizing our unconventional, thermodynamic computing hardware — silicon that exploits physical noise and analog dynamics rather than fighting them.

• This is a hands-on research residency: you'll take ownership of a real technical problem at the boundary of physics, hardware, and machine learning, work alongside the researchers and engineers building our hardware, and be expected to contribute ideas, not just execute someone else's.

• Our hardware is designed to deliver orders-of-magnitude more AI inference per dollar, per watt than conventional GPU
  s — not by porting existing GPU kernels onto new chips, but by rethinking how core operations work when the substrate itself is stochastic analog computation in memory rather than conventional digital logic. That rethinking, from device physics up through algorithms, is exactly the kind of problem residents take on.

• You'll get direct exposure to the pace, ambiguity, and speed of decision-making that comes with working at a fast-moving, well-funded hardware startup — where the distance between an idea on a whiteboard and a test on real silicon is measured in weeks, not years.

• Work hands-on with thermodynamic hardware. Help design, simulate, characterize, or evaluate our hardware, where noise, analog dynamics, and in-memory computation are first-class design elements rather than sources of error to be engineered away.

• Design numerical methods for a new substrate. Explore algorithms and numerical methods that exploit thermal noise and analog dynamics directly, rather than adapting techniques built for conventional digital hardware.

• Drive a research question of your own. Partner with researchers and hardware engineers to scope, run, and iterate on an original technical investigation — from device- or circuit-level physics up to algorithms and workloads that map onto thermodynamic compute.

• Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks. Help build the tests and benchmarks that measure how algorithmic ideas actually perform on real hardware and in simulation, and feed what you learn about model workloads back into hardware design decisions.

• Co-author a paper. Work with the team to write up your findings for submission to a relevant venue, with mentorship on framing, experiments, and technical writing along the way — one of the two…