Rust Software Engineering Intern, Chip Design Tools - Summer

Fab2 • Austin, TX

8d • $114,000 - $131,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We are building the software that silicon chip designers should have had 20 years ago. Designing a chip today means stitching together a pile of desktop software, much of it decades old. We have a lot of respect for those tools, but in many ways they are behind. They've carried the industry this far, but we see enormous room to do better. For example: real version control, real collaboration, and interfaces that give you intuition rather than requiring it. We've concluded that we must build a lot of it from scratch. Studio is a fast, browser-based, multiplayer platform for designing and assembling whole chips. Figma plus GitHub, for silicon. The primary goal is simple: a user should never have to install anything or leave our app to take a chip from idea to finished design. Schematic capture, physical layout, and simulation, all in one place, end to end.
Studio is one half of a bigger idea at Fab2: making chips should be fast. We build our own fab equipment for the same reason we build our own software, because the components for what we want don't exist yet. Studio is the design side of that, and we want to close the feedback loop between designing a chip and fabricating it, so the whole cycle gets faster instead of just one part. Your users include the chip and process engineers sitting near you, which means the feedback loop on your own work is short too.
It's a deep application, dozens of complex tools and the heft of Photoshop, but we want it to feel as intuitive and powerful as Figma. It's Rust across the stack, compiled to WebAssembly, with custom rendering with wgpu/WebGPU, one code path native and in the browser.

Requirements

• Strong Rust, or serious C++/systems experience and the obvious curiosity to go deep in Rust.
• Solid systems fundamentals: memory, performance, concurrency. You profile before you optimize. You've taken something slow and made it fast, and you can tell us about why it was slow.
• A track record of non-trivial software you built from scratch and can walk us through end to end. The weird side project, engine, or tool you wrote because the existing one annoyed you.
• A portfolio (GitHub is fine) is required.

Nice To Haves

• A game, engine, or real-time background: ECS, scene graphs, spatial indexing, physics engines, frame budgets, GUI, low-latency input.
• Some EE, analog and digital. You don't need to be a chip designer.
• Time lived inside deep, serious software, and opinions about it: Blender, Ableton, KiCad, CAD tools, DAWs, game engines.
• Distributed or real-time systems: write-ahead logs, event sourcing, replication, CRDTs, OT, websockets. Data pipelines.
• Geometry, graph, and routing algorithms; spatial data structures; optimization.
• Familiarity with schema evolution and serialization formats like Protobuf, Flatbuffers, Cap’n Proto.
• Graphics and visualization: turning big, complex datasets into something legible, fast, and even beautiful on screen. Custom rendering, shaders, GPU pipelines (WebGPU, Vulkan, OpenGL).
• An interest in version control, not just using Git but how it works underneath.
• Willingness to learn about chip design.

Responsibilities

• Own major features from design through shipping and touch the whole stack.
• Develop deeply interactive, low-latency editing tools.
• Implement a document model that can be diffed and merged like source code and at the same time real-time collaborative.
• Build the sync engine streaming edits between clients.
• Develop a GPU canvas that renders millions of polygons and stays smooth.
• Implement simulation features with streaming waveforms and interactive tiers.
• Contribute to a plugin system built on sandboxed WebAssembly components.
• Develop a scripting API where a script is the same first-class client as the mouse.
• Create integrations that send finished designs to the fab.

Benefits

• Housing Stipend to help with first month expenses
• Lunches daily, Dinners 3x per week, Stocked Office Kitchen with Snacks and Spindrifts
• Weekly Learning & Development opportunities
• Commuter Benefits including Parking and Late Night Uber rides from the office
• Paid Time Off inclusive of Holidays and Sick Time
• Visa Sponsorship
• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• 401(k) retirement plan
• Life and Disability Insurance

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Intern
• Education Level: No Education Listed