EDA / Physical Design Engineer | $250k-$350k base + equity |

If you’re working in physical design and spend too much of your time running existing tools and flows, this might be considerably more interesting.

Greenway Collins are working with a five-person semiconductor startup building AI-powered EDA technology for physical chip design.

They’ve raised $6m, are already working with major semiconductor companies, and have publicly partnered with GlobalFoundries. The founders include one of the world’s leading academics in physical design and VLSI CAD alongside a former Google engineering executive who started his career building EDA tools at Intel.

They’re now hiring several engineers as they build out the founding team.

The problem

Most AI-for-EDA companies are focused on making engineers faster at things they can already do.

This team is going after something harder: using AI to improve power, performance and area in physical design, including optimisation problems that existing human-driven approaches struggle to solve.

You’ll work on things like:

• Place & route and physical design
• PPA optimisation
• Backend IC implementation
• EDA algorithms and tooling
• Complex foundry design rules
• Advanced-node design challenges
• New AI-driven optimisation approaches

You’ll also work directly with major semiconductor customers. At five people, there isn’t much abstraction between you, the technology and the customer problem.

Who should apply

The key requirement is real backend physical-design experience.

You might currently be building EDA tools at Cadence or Synopsys. Or you might be working in physical design at Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Apple, Broadcom, Qualcomm or somewhere similar.

Either background can work.

What’s more important is that you understand physical design beyond simply running scripts and established flows.

If you’ve worked deeply with place & route, PPA optimisation or physical-design tooling and want to get closer to the algorithms and actually build the tools, that’s particularly interesting.

You don’t need to be an AI specialist. They would rather hire someone who deeply understands how chips are designed and teach them the relevant AI than do the reverse.

Around 2-7 years of relevant experience is the natural range, but they’re flexible for exceptional people. BS, MS and PhD candidates will all be considered.

The opportunity

This is about as early as you can join without the company being two people and a PowerPoint.

5 people today. Several hires being made. Major semiconductor customers already engaged.

You’ll work directly with the founders, own meaningful parts of the product and help shape technology rather than inherit it.

$250k-$350k base + equity

Based in Los Altos, California, with the team together Monday-Thursday and Friday flexible.

Relocation support and visa sponsorship are available for strong candidates.

If you’re good at physical design but increasingly interested in building the tools rather than just using them, apply now.