Software Engineer, Chip Design

Ricursive Intelligence • Palo Alto, CA

7h

About The Position

As a Software Engineer at Ricursive, you’ll build the systems and infrastructure that power our end-to-end RTL-to-GDS flow. You’ll work across the broader design stack, improving how we run, evaluate, and iterate on complex chip designs at scale. This includes building reliable execution infrastructure, developing tooling that connects different stages of the flow, improving performance and scalability, and making it easier for our models and engineers to quickly understand the impact of each change. Every improvement compounds: faster runs and tighter feedback loops let us explore more ideas, make better decisions, and reduce iteration cycles. Your work will also have a direct impact on PPA in production. You’ll run against real designs with real constraints, debug issues that only emerge at scale, and make engineering tradeoffs around quality, runtime, robustness, and deadlines—not just performance on academic benchmarks.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Strong programming skills in Python, C++, Java, or a comparable language.
• Comfortable using modern AI-assisted development tools to navigate complex codebases, debug problems, and accelerate engineering workflows.
• Working understanding of the digital chip design flow, including the major stages from RTL through physical design and signoff.
• Experience integrating, automating, or orchestrating EDA tools as part of larger engineering workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to take ownership of ambiguous technical problems, ramp quickly in unfamiliar areas, and drive work through to production.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• Experience with EDA, semiconductor design, distributed systems, or optimization.
• Familiarity with design automation algorithms in one or more areas of the RTL-to-GDS flow, such as placement, timing analysis, RC extraction, netlist processing.
• Demonstrated and quantified the PPA benefit of using AI/ML tooling — AI-driven optimization, ML QoR prediction, or LLM-based flow automation.

Responsibilities

• Develop and scale the infrastructure behind our end-to-end RTL-to-GDSII flow, moving beyond monolithic scripts toward scalable systems that can support hierarchical design, advanced process nodes, and increasingly complex design constraints.
• Work alongside our in-house experts on new ideas to productize cutting-edge algorithms on production flow.
• Build the infrastructure needed to run complex multi-stage design flows reliably across different EDA tools.
• Analyze design metrics like timing violations, congestion, routing issues, and other design problems, helping the overall flow converge faster toward better PPA.
• Deploy AI-driven methods to automate design analysis, optimization, and iteration across the flow.

What This Job Offers

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