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
Behavioral Interview (30 minutes)
Deep dive into experience, motivation, and seniority fit
Coding Take-Home (2–3 hours)
Build a simple RL environment representative of real internal work
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.
Please mention you found this job on AI Jobs. It helps us get more startups to hire on our site. Thanks and good luck!
Understand the required skills and qualifications, anticipate the questions you may be asked, and study well-prepared answers using our sample responses.
Design Engineer Q&A's