Senior Design Engineer

ChipAgents; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary + equity

Unlimited PTO

Full benefits

Office with parking and gym

Job summary

ChipAgents is seeking a Senior Design Engineer to own the product experience across CLI, web, IDE, and desktop interfaces. You will shape workflows from problem definition through launch, working with users, engineers, AI researchers, and leadership to deliver coherent, intuitive experiences.

You will translate chip design and verification workflows into productive user experiences, craft interaction models for AI agents, and drive quality across the engineering team, often coding parts yourself

Qualifications

• Experience building and shipping user-facing software.
• Excellent frontend or product engineering skills.
• Exceptional product, interaction design, and information architecture judgment.
• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and driving alignment without formal authority.
• The ability to reason through complete workflows, including edge cases and failure states.
• Experience working directly with users and translating technical needs into product decisions.
• The ability and desire to quickly learn unfamiliar technical domains.

Responsibilities

• Own the product experience across CLI, web, IDE, desktop, and other agent-native interfaces.
• Translate complex chip design and verification workflows into clear, efficient product experiences.
• Define how users interact with AI agents, including task creation, progress, review, approval, interruption, recovery, and failure handling.
• Work directly with customers and domain experts to understand their workflows and identify the right problems to solve.
• Develop prototypes and production interfaces when code is the fastest way to explore and validate an idea.
• Review and influence product work across the engineering team to maintain a consistently high quality bar.

Skills

Frontend engineering

Product empathy

UX judgment

Ambiguity tolerance

User research

Learning quickly

Job description

About ChipAgents

ChipAgents is revolutionizing chip design and verification with agentic-AI workflows. Founded by experts in AI and semiconductor design, we partner with top-10 semiconductor companies, hyperscale cloud providers, and cutting-edge startups. Our platform accelerates RTL development, functional verification, and simulation, unlocking new levels of productivity and design quality.

Role Overview

We are looking for a Senior Design Engineer to own and drive the product experience across ChipAgents. This is an engineering role for someone with exceptional product judgment and strong opinions about how technical software should work. You will identify user problems, define workflows and interaction models, and ensure that the final experience is coherent, intuitive, and effective.

This role designs experiences across CLI, web, IDE, desktop, and other agent-native interfaces, not simply implementing designs or requirements created by someone else. It involves working directly with users, engineers, AI researchers, and company leadership to shape the product from problem definition through launch and iteration. While you may implement major parts of the experience yourself, your responsibility extends beyond the code you personally write.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the product experience across CLI, web, IDE, desktop, and other agent-native interfaces.

• Translate complex chip design and verification workflows into clear, efficient product experiences.

• Define how users interact with AI agents, including task creation, progress, review, approval, interruption, recovery, and failure handling.

• Work directly with customers and domain experts to understand their workflows and identify the right problems to solve.

• Develop prototypes and production interfaces when code is the fastest way to explore and validate an idea.

• Review and influence product work across the engineering team to maintain a consistently high quality bar.

Qualifications

• Strong experience building and shipping user-facing software.

• Excellent frontend or product engineering skills.

• Exceptional product, interaction design, and information architecture judgment.

• Comfort making decisions under ambiguity and driving alignment without formal authority.

• The ability to reason through complete workflows, including edge cases and failure states.

• Experience working directly with users and translating technical needs into product decisions.

• The ability and desire to quickly learn unfamiliar technical domains.
  

Nice to Haves

• Experience building AI-native products, agents, copilots, or systems with probabilistic behavior.

• Experience with developer tools, command-line products, IDE integrations, or technical enterprise software.

• Familiarity with semiconductor design, verification, EDA tooling, or hardware engineering workflows.

• Experience designing products across multiple interfaces rather than a single web application.

How We Think About This Role

• This is not a traditional product design role centered on producing mockups or Figma files. It is also not a conventional frontend role focused on implementing specifications.

• This role owns how the product works, not just how it looks or who writes each line of code.

Why ChipAgents

• Shape the interface for a category-defining AI platform at the intersection of the two biggest technology waves of the decade, AI and semiconductors.

• Have real design ownership at an early-stage company, not just a seat on a big design system team.

• Work alongside a world-class technical team and an advisory board of EDA legends, with real product, real customers, and real scale already in production.

Equal Opportunity

ChipAgents is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds.

What We Offer

• $180K/yr - $350K/yr base salary + equity. Open to above-scale compensation for exceptional candidates.

• Unlimited PTO and full benefits (medical, vision, dental, 401k).

• Two engineering-centric offices with free parking, private gym, and free lunch, drinks and snacks.