Member of Technical Staff - Microarchitect / RTL Design

Architect Labs; Bengaluru; On-site; INR 4,500,000 - 9,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity stake

Autonomy and visible impact

Job summary

Architect Labs is seeking a Founding Member of the Technical Staff to lead AI-driven RTL design for mission-critical SoC blocks. You will own block-level microarchitecture, define interfaces (AXI/AXI-Stream), and drive end-to-end design flow from frontend to timing closure.

You will collaborate with DV, SW, and ML teams to refine specs, validate with prototypes, and push for area/time/power optimizations on advanced HW accelerators.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in RTL design with at least one advanced-node tapeout experience.
• Domain background in RTL design for HW accelerators and SoCs.
• Clear, synthesizable SystemVerilog RTL with modular, reusable design.
• Hands-on block compute datapaths and data movement experience.
• Solid grasp of SoC methodology: synthesis, timing, CDC, and AXI/AMBA protocols.
• Proficiency in Python for design automation and tooling.
• Ability to own PPA and drive block-wide timing/area closure.
• Leadership potential to grow into team lead over time.

Responsibilities

• Own AI-driven RTL design flow end-to-end from frontend through lint and timing closure.
• Refine microarchitectural specs with principal architect and resolve trade-offs.
• Define and maintain interface specifications (AXI/AXI-Stream, etc.).
• Build and maintain RTL infrastructure, scripts, and regression flows.
• Collaborate with DV to support verification closure and reference models.
• Collaborate with SW/ML teams to improve in-house AI flow.
• Support FPGA prototyping for early functional validation.

Skills

RTL design

SystemVerilog

Python

Design automation

Leadership

AMBA protocols

Education

Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD in Electrical/Computer Engineering

Job description

Architect is a frontier AI lab for chip design. We build AI models and tools for on-demand custom ASICs at scale. Our goal is to co-design custom ASICs alongside evolving ML workloads, and enable a new era of domain-specific chips that unlock capabilities impossible with current hardware paradigms. Born out of Stanford Research, our team blends AI with Silicon with a founding team from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta SuperIntelligence, xAI, Apple and Intel.

What You'll Do

As a Founding Member of the Technical Staff on the RTL Design team at Architect, you'll own the AI-driven microarchitecture and RTL design of mission-critical SoC blocks and sub-systems (SS) going into production silicon. You will be expected to define, drive, and revise the block-level micro-arch specification for one of the fundamental HW accelerator blocks.

As such, you fit our current opportunities if you have hands-on design and block-owner experience in any of the following ASIC components: ML/AI accelerators, SIMD vector engines, DSPs, GPUs, on-chip memory SS, on-chip interconnect SS (NoCs, DMAs, etc.) with custom or standard protocols (AXI, etc.), IO and peripherals integration (PCIe, DDR, CXL, etc.), CPU/Host/controllers, Security, Compression.

As a lab, we are investing in building a world-class HW design team, so if you think you have a particular experience/background that is not listed here, please still reach out to us!

• Own AI-driven RTL design flow end-to-end (at the frontend): through code generation to incorporating feedback from lint, CDC, synthesis, and timing closure stages for closing the design loop.
• Work directly with the principal architect to refine microarchitectural specs, resolve implementation trade-offs, and feed area/timing/power realities back into the architecture and internal AI systems.
• Define and maintain interface specifications (e.g. AXI, AXI-Stream, or custom-built) for block- and SS-level integration.
• Build and maintain RTL infrastructure for our in-house AI-driven flow: design automation scripts, regression flows, lint/CDC waivers, and integration collateral.
• Close collaboration with DV: Support DV bring-up with reference models, assertions, test-plans, and architectural documentation for verification closure.
• Close collaboration with SW and ML: Support and guide our SW and ML experts to revise and improve our in-house AI flow based on your own experience.
• Support FPGA prototyping on Xilinx for early functional validation.

What We'd Like to See

Qualifications & Skills:

• Degree: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.
• Experience: 5+ years (10+ preferred) in RTL design with at least one advanced-node tapeout experience.
• Domain Background: RTL design experience on specialized HW accelerators, such as SoCs/IPs integrating XPUs (NPU, GPU, AR/VR) or AI/ML accelerators. Ideally having worked on Apple Neural Engine, Qualcomm Hexagon NPU / AI Engine, Google Edge TPU, AMD XDNA, Samsung NPU, MediaTek APU, NVIDIA DLA blocks, or accelerators at Groq, Cerebras, MatX, d-Matrix, or similar/equivalent.
• SystemVerilog: Clear, synthesizable, lint-clean RTL with strong design habits such as parameterization, modularity, reuse and configurability.
• Block-Level Depth: Hands-on experience with block-specific compute datapaths and data movement; such as MAC arrays, vector units, accumulators, on-chip SRAM controllers and arbiters, DMA engines, scratchpad memory management, etc.
• SoC Methodology: Solid grasp of synthesis, timing constraints, clock domain crossings, reset strategies, AMBA protocols (AXI, AHB, APB), power management techniques, etc.
• Python: Strong skills for design automation, regression infrastructure, and tooling.
• PPA Ownership: Experience taking a block from RTL through synthesis and working with PD teams on timing/area/power closure.
• Leadership: Ability to lead RTL design efforts and grow into a team lead over time.

Bonus:

• FPGA prototyping experience (ideally Xilinx Vivado/Vitis).
• Familiarity with SIMD/VLIW execution pipelines or instruction-driven datapath design.
• Experience writing SVA assertions and functional coverage for design-side verification.
• Prior IP building and delivery experience on your block-of-expertise, such as DMA controllers, memory subsystems, interconnects, or similar SoC infrastructure blocks.
• Domain-specific expertise: Track record on research and development on energy-efficient, high-performance HW accelerators on your block-of-expertise.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and meaningful equity stake
• Fast-paced startup with autonomy and visible impact
• Cutting-edge challenges at the intersection of AI and silicon design