About the role
We are hiring one Member of Technical Staff to work at the intersection of digital hardware engineering, electronic design automation, and AI research. This is a full-time position based in San Mateo, California.
The core of this role is RTL design, FPGA implementation, verification, and EDA tooling. You will build working hardware systems and the automated workflows that let researchers and AI agents propose changes, test them, and measure whether they are actually better.
We are looking for an engineer who can own the path from specification and architecture through implementation, verification, and measured results. You should be comfortable challenging an evaluation setup, diagnosing a timing or correctness failure, and improving the tools themselves. Firmware, drivers, and experience across the hardware/software boundary are valuable complementary strengths.
What you’ll do
- Design and implement digital hardware in Verilog or SystemVerilog, making explicit trade-offs between functionality, performance, power, area, and implementation complexity.
- Own verification strategies, including testbenches, assertions, reference models, regression suites, and coverage. Turn an ambiguous specification into concrete checks for correctness.
- Take designs through simulation, synthesis, implementation, and timing analysis; validate behavior on FPGA hardware where appropriate and investigate differences between simulation and measured results.
- Build reproducible EDA workflows for design-space exploration, parameter sweeps, tool execution, artifact collection, and comparison against trusted baselines.
- Develop evaluation environments for AI-assisted hardware engineering with clearly specified tasks, fixed constraints, and checks that distinguish real improvements from invalid or incomplete solutions.
- Diagnose failures across RTL, verification infrastructure, timing constraints, EDA tools, and hardware interfaces. Improve the underlying implementation rather than relying on fragile workarounds.
- Own technical direction and implementation for substantial projects, working with researchers and systems engineers to make hardware experiments repeatable and results easy to inspect.
What you’ll bring
- Evidence of independently delivering a substantial digital hardware design or EDA system. You can explain the specification, architecture, verification strategy, implementation constraints, and results you personally owned.
- Strong RTL design skills in Verilog or SystemVerilog, including synchronous design, pipelining, finite-state machines, clock/reset design, and clock-domain crossing.
- Deep verification skills: self-checking testbenches, assertions, corner-case analysis, reference models, and coverage-driven debugging. You understand why passing a simulation is not by itself evidence of correctness.
- Practical experience taking an RTL design through synthesis and implementation, reading timing and utilization reports, writing constraints, and closing timing on FPGA or ASIC flows.
- A strong understanding of computer architecture, memory systems, interconnects, and hardware interfaces, with the ability to reason quantitatively about latency, throughput, and resource use.
- Strong Python and working C or C++ skills for tool development, automation, reference models, and performance analysis. You can navigate unfamiliar codebases and extend existing engineering tools.
- A disciplined approach to experimentation: reproducible tool versions and configurations, controlled baselines, traceable artifacts, and careful interpretation of power, performance, and area results.
- The ability to define a technical plan from an open-ended problem, make defensible design decisions, and deliver with limited oversight. Clear specifications, design reviews, and documentation are expected.
Preferred experience
- Building or contributing to EDA tools, including simulation, synthesis, formal verification, placement and routing, or compiler infrastructure. Experience with tools such as Verilator, Yosys, OpenROAD, or commercial equivalents is valuable.
- Formal property checking, equivalence checking, UVM or cocotb, or verification of complex processors and accelerators.
- FPGA prototyping and board bring-up, or ASIC implementation and tapeout experience with direct responsibility for a meaningful part of the flow.
- Embedded C or C++, firmware, device drivers, bootloaders, RTOS or embedded Linux, and debugging interactions between software and hardware.
- Laboratory debugging with JTAG, logic analyzers, and oscilloscopes; experience with interfaces such as PCIe, Ethernet, SPI, or I²C.
- AI-assisted hardware design, automated optimization, hardware benchmark development, or research publications with substantial implementation work.
How to apply
Email careers@bakelab.ai with your resume and a brief description of a demanding hardware or EDA project you owned. Explain how you established correctness, the constraints you worked within, and the results you achieved. Links to relevant designs, code, papers, or technical writing are welcome.