Head of Silicon

Gradiant; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 120,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Gradiant is seeking a leader to define our silicon direction and to build a team for model-specific inference hardware. You will collaborate with the inference research team to map models to bottlenecks and translate findings into a silicon roadmap, then lead the team through implementation, tape-out and bring-up.

You will hire and lead the initial silicon engineering team, select IP and partners, and drive performance, power, area targets across memory hierarchies and interconnects.

Qualifications

• Led architecture for a complex digital chip and delivered tape-out.
• Strong understanding of computer architecture and memory systems.
• Ability to map workload measurements to architecture decisions.
• Experience across RTL, verification, physical design and software interfaces.
• Proven ability to hire and manage a silicon engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Understand models and hardware bottlenecks with the inference research team.
• Build analytical and simulation models of microarchitectures, memory systems, dataflows, and interconnects.
• Set targets for performance, power, area, cost and reliability.
• Decide which capabilities belong in silicon, software, external IP, or partner designs.
• Develop roadmap through RTL, verification, physical design, tape-out and bring-up.
• Select IP, EDA, foundry, packaging, manufacturing and design partners.
• Hire and lead the initial silicon engineering team.
• Review microarchitecture, RTL, verification, PPA, and bring-up results.
• Define the hardware-software interface with the inference research team.

Skills

Chip architecture leadership

Tape-out experience

RTL & verification

Power & performance trade-offs

Interconnects

Team leadership

Model-driven hardware design

Job description

Define our silicon direction and build a team for model-specific inference hardware.

Why this role exists

This will be our first silicon hire, we do not yet have a fixed micro-architecture. Your first job will be to work with the inference research team to understand the models we want to serve, and the current hardware bottlenecks.

You will build performance models and decide which ideas are worth pursuing. As the direction becomes clear, you will turn that into a silicon roadmap. You will then build and lead the team that takes the architecture through implementation, tape-out, and bring-up

What you will do

• Work with the inference research team to understand open-weight models and current hardware bottlenecks.
• Build analytical and simulation models to compare microarchitectures, memory systems, dataflows, and interconnects.
• Use those results to set targets for performance, power, area, cost, and reliability.
• Decide which capabilities belong in silicon, software, external IP, or partner designs.
• Turn the selected architecture into a roadmap through RTL, verification, physical design, tape-out, and bring-up.
• Select IP, EDA, foundry, packaging, manufacturing, and design partners.
• Hire and lead the initial silicon engineering team.
• Review microarchitecture, RTL, verification, PPA, and bring-up results.
• Define the hardware-software interface with the inference research team.

Problems you may work on

• Microarchitectures and numerical formats for dense, sparse, and mixture-of-experts models.
• Memory hierarchies for weights, activations, and KV-cache state.
• Dataflows for attention, expert routing, prefill, and decode.
• On-chip and chip-to-chip interconnects for model parallelism.
• Performance models that predict latency, throughput, power, and utilization before RTL.
• Hardware-software interfaces that can support new model structures without redesigning the chip.
• Verification strategies for long-running and highly parallel inference workloads.

What we are looking for

• You have led architecture or implementation for a complex digital chip and taken at least one design through tape-out and bring-up.
• You understand computer architecture, memory systems, interconnects, and power trade-offs.
• You can connect workload measurements to architecture decisions.
• You can work across architecture, RTL, verification, physical design, software, and systems.
• You can evaluate external partners and hold them to a high technical standard.
• You have hired and led a silicon engineering team.
• You still enjoy getting your hands dirty in technical work and don't shy away from caring about the details.

This role is not for you if

• You are looking for a well defined role with little ambiguity.
• You want a management-only role.
• You want to copy a general GPU architecture instead of starting with the model definitions.
• You treat software as a fixed input to hardware design.
• You want a large team before you make progress.
• You lean on experience over trying new approaches.