Principal Physical Design Engineer - MCU (Semiconductors)

Location: Catania, Italy

Salary: €61,000–€83,900 gross annual base salary

Company

hirify.global develops industrial and IoT edge-processing solutions, including microcontrollers and high-performance processors for autonomous homes, industrial automation, and personal electronics.

What you will do

• Lead physical design and implementation for complex, high-performance MCU integrated circuits.
• Perform floorplanning, power grid design, place and route, low-power implementation, clock tree synthesis, and timing closure.
• Analyze power integrity, signal integrity, static timing, and physical verification results, including DRC, LVS, and antenna checks.
• Define and implement physical design methodologies, flows, and best practices to optimize performance, power, and area.
• Collaborate with architecture, RTL, DFT, and package teams to deliver tape-out-ready products.
• Mentor physical design engineers and evaluate new EDA tools and technologies.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of professional experience or a master’s degree with 10+ years of professional experience.
• Extensive experience in back-end implementation, synthesis, low-power design, power analysis, equivalence checking, and STA.
• Expertise with physical design and verification tools such as Cadence Innovus, Synopsys Fusion Compiler or ICC2, Ansys RedHawk or PowerSI, PrimeTime, IC Validator, Pegasus, PVS, and Calibre.
• Strong knowledge of advanced technology nodes, preferably 16nm and below, semiconductor device physics, process effects, DFM, and DFY.
• Experience with UPF/CPF, clock gating, power intent, timing constraints, and sign-off criteria.
• Proficiency in Tcl, Python, or Perl, with strong analytical, debugging, communication, collaboration, and mentoring skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Opportunity to work on intelligent AI-at-the-edge microcontrollers and high-impact semiconductor products.
• Cross-functional collaboration across analog, SoC digital design, architecture, RTL, DFT, and packaging.
• Competitive benefits package with potential annual incentives and equity.
• Compensation governed by the applicable National Collective Labour Agreement (Metalmeccanica Industria).
• Commitment to equal pay for equal work and transparent remuneration practices.