GenAlpha

← All open roles

Member of Technical Staff — Forward Deployed Silicon

GenAlpha brings AI to silicon’s toughest challenges. We’re an early-stage startup, founded in 2024 by experts in semiconductors, ML and AI, and backed by Silicon Valley’s best VCs. AI is driving demand for more chips than ever, just as Moore’s Law runs out. Each new chip is harder to design than the last: more complex, more costly and more laborious at every node.

The role

Design circuits with and for our customers, bring GenAlpha’s AI Designers into their teams, and turn what you learn in the field into our next-gen AI Designers. Expect time at customer sites, with some travel.

What you’ll do

Expect to work on any and all of:

• Be the embedded circuit expert with early customers. Onboard their design teams onto GenAlpha’s AI Designers and work through their real designs with them
• Solve customers’ problems, often by doing the work yourself. Scope and deliver design projects using our tools, from custom blocks to reusable silicon IP
• Bring the field back. Turn what you see at customers into product requirements and priorities, and represent the customer when the team decides what to build next
• Get customer environments working: their PDKs, rule decks, flows and conventions, and integration with the verification and simulation tools they already use
• Run demos, pilots and technical evaluations with prospective customers. Define what success looks like, and measure design quality and time saved
• Work across a wide range of customers and circuits, including SerDes, ADCs, PLLs, other data conversion, analog computation, and more
• Train and support users, and write the examples and guides that make the next customer faster
• Design circuits with the team, especially early on and between customer projects, and join the design reviews and product work that shape our AI

What we’re looking for

• Hands-on analog or mixed-signal IC design experience, from industry, graduate research, or both. You have taken blocks from spec through schematic, layout review and post-layout verification
• Solid transistor-level fundamentals: device behavior in modern FinFET, planar or FD-SOI processes, noise, mismatch, linearity, feedback and stability, and the tradeoffs between them
• Comfort building testbenches and running the full set of analyses: DC, AC, transient, noise, loop stability, PVT corners and Monte Carlo
• Fluency with pro-grade custom design flows: Cadence (Virtuoso, Spectre) and/or Synopsys (Custom Compiler, HSPICE/PrimeSim), plus physical verification and extraction (Calibre, ICV, StarRC, Quantus)
• Experience reviewing and driving custom IC layout, through design review, process and design knowledge
• Clear communication with two audiences: other circuit designers, and software and AI engineers who aren’t.
• BS, MS or PhD in Electrical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent experience
• You do not need to write software. Scripting (Python, SKILL, Tcl) helps, but nobody here will give you a coding interview

Also important for this role:

• Customer-facing or cross-team technical experience. That could be applications or field engineering, design services, being a liaison between design and other teams, or championing a tool or methodology inside your own company
• The judgment to look past what a customer asks for and find the real problem underneath
• Comfort with ambiguity and a changing plan: new customers, new circuit types and new processes
• Willingness to spend real time at customer sites, with some travel

Bonus points for:

• Tape-outs at advanced nodes, and silicon bring-up or lab characterization
• Experience across several circuit categories, or across several foundries and processes
• Technical pre-sales, customer training, or leading engagements with outside design teams
• Having already used AI tools in your own design work, and having opinions about where they help and where they don’t

Missing a few boxes? Apply anyway.

This is a new kind of job, and nobody has done exactly this before. The best candidates will be strong in some of these areas and learning others. Some will be excellent designers who have never faced a customer. Others will have spent years with customers and want to get back into design. If you can design circuits, can explain them, and want to help decide what this field looks like once AI is part of it, please get in touch, even if you don’t match every line.

Email careers@ →

#Culture

We’re a small, all-technical team, all working at the forefront of turning AI into next-gen silicon. We’re headquartered in San Francisco and built for close collaboration. We value engineers who are unafraid to try and learn new and valuable tools, wherever they can be found. Past experience in customer-facing engineering roles is a plus. Desire to grow into engineering leadership is a plus. Desire to work in a rapidly changing, early stage startup environment is a must.

Everyone on the GenAlpha team gets the same title: Member of Technical Staff. Compensation varies with experience and fit, with competitive salaries and meaningful equity for all team members. We provide the best medical, dental, and vision coverage we can get, for both you and family. We sponsor work visas and permanent residency applications for qualified international candidates.

Req ID: R8

---

GenAlpha · San Francisco, CA