Founding Principal Design Engineer
Gemstar Staffing Group is looking for a Founding Principal Design Engineer for an onsite position located in Palo Alto, CA.
Please send us your resume on our contact us page if you meet the skills below.
The Client: The client is building AI agents that automate semiconductor design flows. They just raised $4.5M pre-seed to solve the biggest bottleneck in chip design using AI.
What we're looking for: We need someone with 5+ years of hardware design experience who has led hardware development initiatives at cutting-edge chip companies. You should be comfortable working in high-velocity startup environments and have a track record of building complex hardware systems from scratch. Bonus points if you have strong Python programming skills and experience bridging hardware/software domains.
What you'll do:
Lead RTL, DV, or PD efforts that directly impact our AI-driven chip design platform
Take ownership of hardware evaluation frameworks and drive benchmarking initiatives
Work closely with ML engineers to translate hardware requirements into actionable specifications
Build and maintain hardware testing infrastructure that validates our AI-generated designs
Lead client conversations to understand hardware requirements and translate them for the technical team
Architect and implement hardware evaluation pipelines from requirements gathering to validation
Qualifications:
2+ years of experience in chip design workflows, ideally contributing to real-world tapeouts
Proven expertise of more than 2 years in digital design (RTL/FPGA/ASIC)
Executed RTL design and synthesis
Led complex IP design from spec to silicon
Architecture as a background with considerable design experience (multiple products - over 10 years of experience is a minimum)
Exposure to AI-for-chip-design initiatives or a strong understanding of modern ML workflows.
Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline
Expertise in SystemVerilog, Verilog & SoC design methodologies.
Proficiency in Python/Bash for software development.
CPU/processor architecture knowledge
Experience with hardware/software integration
Day-to-day example: You might start your week reviewing chip work generated by our AI models, work with ML engineers to refine the training data based on hardware constraints, and spend time on calls with chip design teams to understand their pain points. Last month, our team needed to validate that our AI models were generating functionally correct hardware designs - the person in this role would have designed the verification framework and evaluation metrics. This is the kind of hands-on, high-impact technical work you'd thrive in.
Please send us your resume on our contact us page if you meet the skills above.