Founding Hardware Design Engineer FT $180-250K Visa OK

Founding Hardware Design Engineer

(Path to Director of Engineering Design)

📍 Location: San Francisco, CA (Mission Bay)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-time
🏢 Work Policy: On-site, 5 days/week
👥 Hiring Count: 3 positions available
💰 Salary: $180,000 – $250,000 base
📈 Equity: Competitive, early-stage
🌍 Visa Sponsorship: Available

About Our Client

Our Client is a prestigious, well-funded startup building high-fidelity reinforcement learning (RL) environments that allow AI systems to master real-world engineering. The company distills expert workflows from IP-locked, constraint-heavy domains, enabling AI models to reason about, design, and validate physical systems.

Starting with hardware and chip design, the platform is designed to expand into mechanics, manufacturing, and other engineered systems that shape the real world. The team works closely with frontier AI labs, AI accelerator companies, and advanced research organizations.

The Role

We are hiring Founding Hardware Design Engineers to define the technical foundation of our hardware-focused RL environments. This is a senior, high-impact role that begins as a hands-on individual contributor and scales into a Director of Engineering Design position for high performers.

You will be responsible for translating real-world hardware engineering knowledge into environments that AI systems can learn from—balancing correctness, realism, and scalability—while helping define the technical culture and standards of the company.

What You’ll Do

• Design and implement RTL-level simulation environments for reinforcement learning

• Translate real hardware constraints into reward functions, state spaces, and evaluation metrics

• Architect, validate, and curate high-quality chip design problems for AI training

• Build and own a reusable catalog of parameterized ASIC/SoC design tasks

• Collaborate closely with AI researchers and research-driven customers

• Identify, document, and mitigate failure modes of LLMs and RL agents in hardware design

• Drive curriculum and roadmap development for how models learn engineering concepts

• Set a high technical bar for correctness, rigor, and realism

Seniority & Experience

• 4–10 years of experience as a Hardware Design Engineer with front-end ASIC/SoC RTL focus

• Proven experience in pre-silicon digital design (RTL) with a demonstrated record of successful tape-outs, including advanced technology nodes

• Strong startup mentality, gained through early-stage companies or 0→1 system-building experience

• Experience with ML and RL environments or prior work at NVIDIA, Apple Silicon, Google TPU, or AI accelerator companies is highly valued

• Demonstrated agency, ownership, and clear communication skills

Hard Skills

• Deep expertise in RTL hardware design

• Ability to validate, assess, and curate chip design quality

• Experience architecting complex subsystem IPs and hardware accelerators

• Strong understanding of design constraints, tradeoffs, and correctness

Soft Skills

• Clear communicator able to distill complex hardware concepts into simple ideas for AI researchers with limited hardware backgrounds

• High agency and ownership to drive curriculum and technical roadmap development

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and working cross-functionally in fast-moving environments

What We Value

• Correctness over demos

• First-principles thinking

• Intellectual honesty about AI limitations

• Ownership, accountability, and execution

• Clear, thoughtful communication across disciplines

Interview Process

1. Behavioral Interview (30 minutes)
   Deep dive into experience, motivation, and seniority fit

2. Coding Take-Home (2–3 hours)
   Build a simple RL environment representative of real internal work

3. Take-Home Review (30–45 minutes)
   Walkthrough of your approach and design decisions with the CTO

TopTech Talent is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, protected veteran status, gender identity or any other factor protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.

🚫 Third-party recruiters, please do not reach out for this role.

Salary : $180,000 - $250,000