RTL Design Engineer

Etched; Cupertino (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Full medical, dental, and vision packages

Housing subsidy of $2,000/month

Daily lunch and dinner in-office

Relocation support

Job summary

A leading AI hardware company in Cupertino seeks an experienced RTL Engineer to ensure efficient operations of their AI chips. You will design verification strategies for existing and upcoming ASIC designs, collaborate with teams, and work in a high-autonomy, fast-paced environment. Ideal candidates will have over 5 years in RTL development and are eager to learn about modern AI technologies. The company offers competitive benefits, including a housing subsidy and full medical coverage.

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of work experience in RTL development.
• Experience with high-speed digital logic.
• Willingness to learn quickly about transformers and AI aspects.
• Familiarity with verification work and writing test benches.
• Able to learn quickly about transformers and other AI aspects.
• Willing to start quickly.

Responsibilities

• Develop and implement design verification strategies for ASIC designs.
• Ensure AI chips operate correctly and efficiently.
• Collaborate with various teams to meet timing and area constraints.
• Learn quickly about transformers and other AI architectures.

Skills

RTL development

High-speed digital logic

Proficiency in RTL design tools

Verification and test benches

Python scripting

Tools

RTL design tools

Job description

Overview

Etched is building AI chips that are hard-coded for individual model architectures. Our first product (Sohu) only supports transformers, but has an order of magnitude more throughput and lower latency than a B200. With Etched ASICs, you can build products that would be impossible with GPUs, like real-time video generation models and extremely deep chain-of-thought reasoning.

Responsibilities

As an RTL Engineer at Etched, you will be critical in ensuring that our AI chips operate correctly and efficiently. You will develop and implement design verification strategies for both our existing and upcoming ASIC designs.

In this role, you will work closely with state-of-the-art architectures for machine learning. You do not need to have experience working with these yet, but you will be willing and able to learn quickly. You will work in a fast-paced environment with a high degree of autonomy, and be responsible for a key part of Etched’s success.

Representative projects:

• Implement a block to efficiently compute floating point math operators


• Provide feedback to the uArch team to make sure blocks meet timing and area constraints

Qualifications

• At least 5 years of work experience in RTL development.


• Experience with high-speed digital logic.


• Proficiency in standard RTL design and synthesis tools


• Familiarity with verification work and writing test benches


• Are able to learn quickly about transformers and other aspects of modern artificial intelligence


• Willing to start quickly

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with PCIe, Ethernet, or HBM technologies


• Familiarity with transformer models and machine learning.


• Familiarity with numerical representations and functions


• Ability to program with Python or another scripting language

We encourage you to apply even if you do not believe you meet every single qualification.

Benefits

• Full medical, dental, and vision packages, with 100% of premium covered, 90% for dependents


• Housing subsidy of $2,000/month for those living within walking distance of the office


• Daily lunch and dinner in our office


• Relocation support for those moving to Cupertino

Why Etched is different

Etched believes in the Bitter Lesson. We think most of the progress in the AI field has come from using more FLOPs to train and run models, and the best way to get more FLOPs is to build model-specific hardware. Larger and larger training runs encourage companies to consolidate around fewer model architectures, which creates a market for single-model ASICs.

We are a fully in-person team in Cupertino, and greatly value engineering skills. We do not have boundaries between engineering and research, and we expect all of our technical staff to contribute to both as needed.

Equal Opportunity

Etched is an equal employment opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of any protected status under applicable law. We may collect voluntary information for government reporting purposes; completion is voluntary and confidential. Any information you provide will be kept confidential.