Lead ASIC Design Verification Engineer (UVM)

Chelsea Search Group • Minneapolis, MN

2d

About The Position

A Lead ASIC Design Verification Engineer will establish, staff, and lead our ASIC verification team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role – you will personally architect and build UVM testbenches for our current programs while simultaneously defining the verification methodology, infrastructure, and hiring plan that will scale the function from a single contributor to a full team. You will be the technical authority on verification – setting coverage-driven sign-off criteria, owning verification schedule and risk for tapeouts, and making the build-versus-buy calls on VIP, tools, and compute. If you have been the strongest verification engineer on someone else’s team and want to build your own, this is the role.

Requirements

• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or Computer Science.
• 8+ years of ASIC/SoC verification experience, with demonstrated ownership of verification for at least one production tapeout.
• Expert-level SystemVerilog and UVM. You have architected UVM environments from scratch — not only extended environments built by others.
• Strong command of constrained-random verification, functional coverage, coverage-driven closure, and assertion-based verification with SVA.
• Experience with commercial simulation and coverage tools (Synopsys VCS/Verdi, Cadence Xcelium, and/or Siemens Questa) and with regression management at scale.
• Working knowledge of digital design and RTL — sufficient to read, reason about, and debug a designer's code, and to argue productively about intent versus implementation.
• Scripting proficiency for verification infrastructure (Python, Perl, TCL, and shell) and fluency with Git-based workflows and Linux development environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership: mentoring engineers, leading a verification effort, or owning verification schedule and sign-off for a program.
• Clear written and verbal communication — including the ability to present verification status and evidence to non-verification stakeholders and customers.
• U.S. Citizenship is required due to ITAR and DFARS requirements applicable to our programs, along with the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the ASIC verification methodology, standards, and sign-off criteria across company programs.
• Architect UVM-based verification environments for digital SoCs, memory subsystems, secure boot and cryptographic subsystems, and die-to-die interfaces.
• Establish reusable verification infrastructure — base classes, VIP strategy, scoreboarding and checker architecture, register abstraction (UVM RAL), and coverage models — designed for reuse across programs and derivative parts.
• Own verification planning: testplan development, coverage closure strategy, regression architecture, and quantitative sign-off metrics reported to program and customer stakeholders.
• Serve as the verification voice in design and architecture reviews, and as the technical interface to customers, primes, and government stakeholders on verification approach and evidence.
• Onboard, mentor, and technically develop verification engineers, including junior engineers and design engineers transitioning into verification.
• Define team structure, roles, and hiring profiles for the verification organization; participate directly in recruiting, interviewing, and selection.
• Establish and enforce code review, revision control, documentation, and traceability practices appropriate to defense-qualified deliverables.
• Allocate verification effort across concurrent programs and communicate resourcing risk to engineering and program management.
• Write SystemVerilog/UVM testbench code, sequences, agents, and functional coverage models — this role is expected to remain approximately 50–70% hands-on.
• Drive constrained-random and directed verification to coverage closure; triage failures and drive root-cause resolution with designers.
• Apply complementary methods where they are the right tool: formal property verification, assertion-based verification (SVA), gate-level simulation, and emulation/prototyping.
• Support verification of radiation-hardening and fault-tolerance features, including TMR structures, error detection and correction, and SEU/SET mitigation behavior.
• Support post-silicon bring-up by correlating silicon behavior to pre-silicon models and closing verification gaps.
• Own and maintain regression infrastructure, simulation licensing and compute utilization, and CI for verification.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior