Member of Technical Staff - Microarchitect / RTL Design

Kindredventures; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity stake

Fast-paced startup environment

Job summary

Kindredventures in Palo Alto seeks a Founding Member of the Technical Staff for the RTL Design team. Your role will encompass AI-driven RTL design of critical SoC blocks and engage in challenges at the intersection of AI and silicon design.

The position requires significant experience in RTL design, preferably 5+ years, with a focus on designing custom accelerators. We provide a competitive salary and equity stake in a fast-paced startup environment where your impact is visible.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in RTL design, with specialization in HW accelerators.
• Experience with advanced-node tapeout.
• Strong design habits such as parameterization and modularity.

Responsibilities

• Own AI-driven RTL design flow end-to-end through code generation.
• Work with the principal architect on microarchitectural specifications.
• Define and maintain interface specifications for integration.

Skills

SystemVerilog

RTL design

Python

SoC methodology

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering

Tools

Xilinx

Vivado/Vitis

Job description

About Architect

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: 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, Debug/DFT (BIST, MBIST, etc.), and specialized accelerators such as ML/AI accelerators (NPUs, TPUs, etc.), SIMD vector engines, DSPs, GPUs, graphics/audio pipelines.

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, worked on specialized HW accelerators.

• 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:

• Low-power design techniques: clock gating, power gating, multi-voltage domains, UPF.

• 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