Founding Physical Design Engineer

Physical Design Lead
- Founding Engineer
- Stealth Startup

A fast-growing semiconductor startup working in the AI silicon space is developing an AI-driven chip-design platform. The team combines deep expertise across AI, semiconductor architecture, physical design and chip development, with a focus on building highly automated approaches to custom silicon development.

They're looking for an engineering leader to drive physical implementation for custom ASICs. This is an end-to-end technical leadership role setting up architecture, collaborating with the wider team and eventually building out your own too.

• Lead deployment of AI-driven design-optimisation engines to automate macro placement, optimise clock and power distribution networks, and maximise PPA.
• Address physical-design challenges associated with AI workloads, including dynamic IR-drop, thermal-density mitigation and multi-GHz clock-tree synthesis.
• Own end-to-end physical implementation across custom ASICs.
• Build and grow out a team, serving as a technical lead.

• 5–10 years of physical-design experience
  , with a track record of taking complex, large-die SoCs or compute subsystems through tape-out.
• Hands-on experience integrating AI-enabled design-optimisation tools into production implementation flows.
• Strong AI literacy within the implementation workflow, particularly optimisations relevant to EDA and layout density.
• Proven expertise in physical sign-off
  , including STA, DRC, LVS and EM/IR on advanced process nodes.

This is one of the most unique and in-demand roles going at the moment - if you're interested.