Founding Member of the Technical Staff - Formal Methods (AI/Silicon)

Location: On-site in Palo Alto, California, United States

Company

hirify.global is an AI lab building systems for on-demand custom ASIC design and co-designing domain-specific chips alongside evolving machine-learning workloads.

What you will do

• Design and implement a formal specification language and intermediate representation spanning hardware specifications, testbenches, assertions, and RTL.
• Build proof-obligation generators that produce checkable claims for assertion entailment and RTL refinement.
• Integrate SMT solvers, model checkers, proof assistants, and automated verification tooling.
• Develop soundness arguments and coverage-adequacy methods for validating generated hardware artifacts.
• Co-design the formal layer with verification methodology and ML research teams.
• Own the formal stack end to end, from specification and IR through solver integration and empirical validation on real hardware blocks.

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, EECS, or a closely related field, with formal-methods work applied to hardware or systems; exceptional BS/MS candidates with strong industrial formal-verification experience may be considered.
• Deep expertise in at least two of temporal logic and model checking, SMT-based verification, refinement-based specification, or proof assistants applied to hardware, distributed, concurrent, or low-level systems.
• Experience with formal frameworks or proof tools such as TLA+, Lean, Coq, or similar.
• Demonstrated experience applying formal methods to a real artifact that shipped, in addition to published proofs.
• Strong software engineering skills, including compiler-style infrastructure and automated pipeline integration.
• Ability to turn research-grade formal methods into production components on a chip-design timeline.

Nice to have

• Industrial formal-verification experience at silicon companies, automated-reasoning groups, or formal-methods firms.
• Experience designing HLS tools, compiler infrastructure, intermediate representations, or domain-specific languages.
• Publications at leading formal-methods, programming-languages, or EDA venues.
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML systems and the interaction between learned components and formal guarantees.
• Experience as an early technical hire at a deep-tech or formal-methods startup.

Culture & Benefits

• Competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake.
• Fast-paced startup environment with autonomy and visible impact.
• Foundational work at the intersection of formal methods, AI, and silicon.