Sr. to Lead Software Engineer - Hardware Design Automation Startup

Sr. to Lead Software Engineer - Hardware Design Automation Startup

Berkeley, CA (you can work from home up to 3x/week)

The company’s product involves AI and hardware design automation. Its software is accelerating the development of hardware so that things that used to take months can be done 10x faster.

The company has 12 employees and 8 engineers. The company has raised series A funding and expects to raised series B funding soon. Its growing list of customers includes leading hardware companies.

The company has great work life balance; they average 40 hours/week and prefer to work a solid, focused 40 hours rather than working longer hours.

The company seeks programming language agnostic engineers with strong algorithmic problem-solving skills, excellent software engineering fundamentals, and the ability to own large projects independently. They want someone who thrives in startup environments, handles ambiguity well, and consistently delivers production-quality solutions.

In this position, you would own major product initiatives from design through deployment, solve complex technical problems, build and improve core platform capabilities, and collaborate across the company to deliver impactful features. The role combines hands-on coding, technical leadership, architecture decisions, and end-to-end ownership of significant product areas. Depending on your preference you could be spending 75-100% of your time on backend engineering and 0-25% on front end engineering.

The company will pay up to $250k in salary, plus equity which could be lucrative.

Job Responsibilities:

- Designing and developing design automation algorithms for PCB placement, routing, pin assignment, geometry generation, computational geometry, spatial data structures, constraint solving, and optimization.

- Designing and developing end-to-end software solutions for complex computational and algorithmic challenges that power advanced PCB design workflows.

- Developing and enhancing the simulation loop by integrating industry-standard circuit simulation tools, such as Ansys HFSS, into the design engine.

- Building automated closed-loop design optimization systems that leverage simulation results to provide faster feedback, identify design issues earlier, and continuously improve hardware designs.

- Integrating the internal design engine with external simulation and solver technologies to enable seamless closed-loop design iteration.

- Owning major product areas from architecture through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing enhancement.

Qualifications:

- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent industry experience.

- Proficient in C or C#.

- Strong in at least one of these programming languages: C#, C , Java, Go, Scala, or Rust.

- Strong software engineering fundamentals with a track record of designing, building, and owning large, production-quality features from planning through deployment.

- Strong algorithmic problem-solving skills, including graph and tree data structures, computational efficiency, parallelism, and designing elegant solutions to complex computational problems.

- Strong mathematical foundation with the ability to reason formally about geometry, linear algebra, optimization, algorithm complexity, and constraint-solving.

- Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-ready code with a focus on reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability.

- Ability to think strategically, understand how individual work fits into the broader product vision, and make sound architectural decisions.

- Self-directed, highly resourceful, and able to work effectively in a fast-paced startup environment with ambiguity while proactively unblocking yourself and others.

- Strong ownership mindset with excellent judgment, including asking the right questions, identifying problems early, and driving solutions from concept through production.

Nice to Have:

- Experience with computational geometry, spatial data structures, geometric algorithms, or related mathematical domains.

- Experience programming in multiple languages and paradigms.

- Interest in or experience with hardware design, electronics, PCB design, EDA, or CAD software.

About Skyrocket Ventures

Skyrocket Ventures is a recruiting firm for hundreds of high growth technology companies that range from industry leaders to top-tier startups. This opportunity is with one of our client companies for a full-time permanent hire. Please only apply if you are authorized to work in the U.S.

Please note that even if this job is not a perfect match, we encourage you to apply as long as it is in the ballpark. Companies are often flexible in hiring candidates who do not perfectly fit their written job description, as long as the most important qualifications are there and the candidate is good in general.

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