Principal ASIC Architect

Tensordyne; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive pay

Comprehensive benefits

Flexibility

Recognition programs

Job summary

Tensordyne, based in Sunnyvale, CA, is looking for an experienced engineer to lead ASIC architecture for generative AI processors. In this role, you will manage the design and implementation of cutting-edge silicon solutions essential for AI inference. Candidates should have over 15 years of hands-on experience in silicon design and a strong understanding of generative AI algorithms.

Your work will involve coordinating with various engineering teams, ensuring that product specifications meet performance and power efficiency standards. This is a unique opportunity to influence the future of AI technology.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of silicon design engineering and architectural planning experience.
• Deep expertise in generative AI algorithms and related hardware mapping.
• Experience with performance modeling and debugging.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural planning and design for AI processors.
• Prepare detailed design specifications and milestones.
• Evaluate new silicon IP technologies and enhance chip design process.

Skills

Silicon design engineering

High performance compute (HPC) processors

Verilog programming

C/C++ programming

Performance analysis and optimization

Education

MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or related

Tools

RTL verification tools

EDA tools

SystemC or TLM

Scripting languages (Python, Perl)

Job description

About our company - Tensordyne (formerly Recogni)

AI is reshaping our world, performing cognitive tasks once unique to humans—perceiving across modalities, learning quickly, and solving complex problems. Tensordyne builds high-performance, low-power generative AI inference systems. We’re leveraging novel techniques from the latest AI research to build custom silicon, hardware, and software to accelerate multimodal generative AI at scale—delivering safe, sustainable, cutting-edge solutions for hyperscaler and neocloud data centers. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, and Munich, Germany, with remote team members across North America and Europe, Tensordyne is a well-funded, fast-moving startup. We support our people with competitive pay, comprehensive benefits, flexibility, and recognition programs—because breakthrough technology starts with a healthy, empowered team. Come join us, as we shape the future of AI together!

The Opportunity

In this role, you will lead all phases of ASIC architecture definition and design of Tensordyne’s next-generation family of processors for generative AI inference acceleration. This is an exciting opportunity that involves high-level silicon architecture planning, hands‑on design, prototyping of ASIC design concepts, mentoring, and technical leadership to deliver the high-performance multi‑chip silicon solutions that are at the heart of Tensordyne’s vertically integrated, generative AI inference acceleration systems for data centers.

• What You'll Do:
• Lead the architectural planning and definition of new Tensordyne AI processors, that consist of highly specialized floating point AI compute cores, embedded memory, embedded RISC‑V CPU cores, and high speed serial communications with chip‑to‑chip networking fabric, HBM, and PCIe connectivity.
• Analyze technical needs, propose chip design solutions, create detailed design specifications, lead architectural modeling and establish ASIC development milestones to ensure that the final product meets requirements related to functionality, inference performance, inference accuracy, power efficiency, programmability, debuggability and manufacturability.
• Work closely with external engineering partners, ASIC design engineers, ASIC design verification teams, SOC physical design teams, interdisciplinary software teams, product management and executives, providing technical guidance, overseeing design reviews and mentoring where applicable.
• Lead the evaluation of new silicon IP technologies, EDA tools and methodologies to enhance the product and improve the efficiency of our chip design process.

What You'll Bring

• 15+ years of hands‑on experience and deep expertise in silicon design engineering and architectural planning of high performance compute (HPC) processors like GPUs, CPUs, TPUs etc., as well as HBM and high speed SerDes networking technologies for AI workloads.
• Strong understanding of generative AI algorithms, attention mechanisms, foundation transformer models, and mapping these functions to hardware.
• Strong Verilog programming skills, and experience with RTL verification, and performance modeling. Experience with performance analysis, debugging, and optimization is also required.
• Track record of developing architectural C-models, SystemC, or TLM. Expert‑level skills in C/C++, and scripting languages like Python or Perl for automation and modeling.
• An MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering or related engineering discipline.

For this role, occasional travel is needed to interact with global engineering partners.

Tensordyne's culture was built on the following values:

• Put people first. We only succeed when our people succeed.
• Ethics and integrity always; Being open, honest, and respectful of everyone.
• Think Big. Be ambitious and have audacious goals.
• Aim for excellence. Quality and excellence count in everything we do.
• Own it and get it done. Results matter!
• Make each person better together, than they would be as an individual.
• Embrace each others’ differences, and embrace that there will be differences.

Tensordyne is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that a diverse team is better at tackling complex problems and coming up with innovative solutions. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, gender identity or expression, marital status, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, race, religion, pregnancy, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances.

A note to Recruitment Agencies: Please don’t reach out to Tensordyne employees or leaders about our roles -- we’ve got it covered. We don’t accept unsolicited agency resumes and we are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes. Thank you for your understanding.