Senior/Principal SoC Architect (AI)

Location: Santa Clara, California, United States

Salary: $250,000–$350,000 per year

Company

An early-stage semiconductor company developing next-generation compute platforms for large-scale AI and data-center workloads.

What you will do

• Define end-to-end SoC and chiplet architectures for high-performance compute platforms.
• Develop detailed architectural specifications covering connectivity, memory, processor subsystems, boot, security, power, reset, and clocking.
• Model bandwidth, latency, traffic behavior, and system-level performance.
• Make tradeoffs across performance, power, area, cost, complexity, and schedule.
• Partner with RTL, firmware, verification, physical design, packaging, and software teams through implementation.
• Guide tapeout, first-silicon bring-up, validation, debugging, system integration, and performance tuning.

Requirements

• Proven experience architecting complex SoCs that reached silicon and shipped in production systems.
• Strong knowledge of SoC subsystems, high-speed I/O, coherent or non-coherent interconnects, and multi-device communication.
• Experience with memory-subsystem architecture, bandwidth modeling, and memory-controller integration.
• Knowledge of processor complexes, boot, security, power, reset, and clocking architecture.
• Ability to translate ambiguous requirements into concrete, verifiable designs and make architecture tradeoffs.
• Experience collaborating across architecture, RTL, firmware, verification, physical design, packaging, and post-silicon teams.

Nice to have

• Chiplet or multi-die SoC architecture and high-speed die-to-die interfaces.
• Advanced memory technologies, AI accelerators, GPUs, custom compute silicon, or data-center processors.
• High-bandwidth networking, system-level performance modeling, silicon bring-up, and post-silicon optimization.
• Hardware-software co-design and experience in early-stage semiconductor environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on, execution-focused work across the full SoC lifecycle.
• Close collaboration across multiple engineering disciplines.
• Opportunity to work in an early-stage semiconductor environment and contribute to production silicon.