Ph.D. Intern - AI/ML & Design Automation

Location: Santa Clara, CA, United States

Salary: $37–$73 per hour

Company

hirify.global develops semiconductor solutions and silicon infrastructure for enterprise, cloud, AI, and carrier architectures.

What you will do

• Apply machine learning to chip design tasks including placement, routing, timing closure, power estimation, and design rule checking.
• Work with production EDA flows and real design data from 3nm and 2nm semiconductor processes.
• Build predictive models, reduce design iteration cycles, and improve first-pass silicon results.
• Design and deploy LLM-based tools, agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, and fine-tuning workflows for engineering teams.
• Evaluate model performance, safety, and reliability using production feedback and rigorous experiments.
• Present research findings, implementation results, and adoption metrics to technical and cross-functional leadership.

Requirements

• Currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or a related field, with research focused on machine learning, AI systems, or a related area.
• Hands-on experience training, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Production-quality Python, Git, and software development best practices.
• Experience designing experiments, measuring results, and drawing defensible conclusions from data.
• For the hardware track: knowledge of VLSI, circuit design, computer architecture, or EDA, plus familiarity with GNNs, reinforcement learning, or generative models.
• For the enterprise AI track: experience with LLMs, multimodal models, RAG, agentic protocols, transformers, diffusion models, and AI orchestration frameworks.

Nice to have

• Exposure to Cadence, Synopsys, or equivalent EDA tools and chip design flows.
• Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, n8n, MCP, or A2A.
• Experience developing end-to-end data pipelines and deploying models with data engineering or platform teams.
• Ability to independently research current AI literature and implement concepts in working systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on applied AI research at production scale using real semiconductor design data.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for interns.
• Paid holidays, mental health resources, perks, and discounts.
• Additional compensation may be available for Ph.D. interns.
• Access to export-controlled technology may require eligibility under U.S. export control laws and an export license review.

Hiring process

• Interviews evaluate individual experience, reasoning, and communication in real time.
• AI tools, transcription applications, automated note-taking, and real-time answer generators are prohibited during interviews.