Physical Design Engineer (AI Hardware)

Location: On-site in Austin, with regular time spent working alongside the team in San Jose. During the first quarter, approximately two weeks per month are spent at the San Jose headquarters; afterward, approximately one week per month.

Salary: $200,000–$300,000 per year plus significant equity.

Company

hirify.global builds co-designed chips, racks, software, and manufacturing systems for high-throughput, low-latency frontier AI inference.

What you will do

• Own block-level physical design implementation, verification, and closure.
• Run and improve physical design flows while supporting ASIC and CAD infrastructure.
• Drive timing closure and power, performance, and area optimization in collaboration with RTL designers.
• Build dashboards to track physical design project convergence and improve iteration speed.
• Optimize EDA tool flows and work with vendors to adopt new capabilities.
• Supervise outsourced physical design work performed by third-party services.

Requirements

• 5–10+ years of physical design experience.
• Experience with RTL synthesis through GDSII sign-off and automated RTL-to-GDSII flows.
• Back-end design and timing closure experience on advanced process nodes of 5nm and below.
• Experience with Cadence Innovus or Genus, or Synopsys ICC2 or Fusion Compiler.
• Experience with sign-off tools such as PrimeTime, Tempus, or Voltus.
• Knowledge of low-power design, synthesis, scan insertion/ATPG, formal verification, floorplanning, placement, CTS, routing, IR drop, and EM/antenna analysis.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with modern ML and LLM model architectures.
• Python or another scripting language.
• Experience with AI tools for programming and coding.
• Startup experience or comfort working in fast-paced environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage with generous premium support.
• $500 monthly credit for waiving medical benefits.
• Wellness benefits covering fitness, mental health, and more.
• Daily lunch and dinner in the office.
• Unlimited compute budget subject to ROI justification.
• Technical staff contribute across engineering and research without strict boundaries.