RTL Design Engineer

Job Title

RTL Design Engineer

Role Summary

The RTL Design Engineer will develop and verify RTL for Etched's inference-focused AI ASICs, ensuring correctness, timing, and area efficiency. You will implement and optimize RTL blocks, author verification strategies and testbenches, and collaborate closely with microarchitecture and synthesis teams.

This is a fully in-person role based in San Jose (Santana Row) and involves working across design, verification, and architecture disciplines.

Experience Level

Mid-level — typically around 5+ years of RTL development experience (the posting requests at least 5 years).

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include RTL development, verification, and cross-team collaboration to deliver silicon that meets functional, timing, and area goals.

• Design and implement RTL blocks, including performance-sensitive floating-point/math operators.
• Develop and execute verification strategies and write testbenches for ASIC blocks.
• Work with microarchitecture and synthesis teams to meet timing, area, and integration constraints.
• Optimize RTL for synthesis and timing closure; support synthesis runs and constraint management.
• Debug functional and timing issues through simulation and waveform analysis.
• Learn and apply concepts from modern ML architectures as required by the product.

Requirements

Must-have technical skills and experience to perform this role.

• At least 5 years of professional RTL development experience.
• Experience with high-speed digital logic design.
• Proficiency with standard RTL design and synthesis tools and flows.
• Familiarity with verification practices and writing testbenches.
• Ability to learn modern ML/transformer-related architecture concepts quickly.
• Available to work on-site in San Jose; able to start promptly.

Nice-to-have:

• Experience with PCIe, Ethernet, or HBM technologies.
• Familiarity with modern ML and LLM model architectures.
• Knowledge of numerical representations and functions.
• Ability to script in Python or a similar language for verification and automation.

Education Requirements

Not specified.

About the Company

Company: Etched

Headquarters: San Jose, CA, United States

Etched develops purpose-built AI inference ASICs and systems optimized for transformer models, aiming to deliver significantly higher performance, lower cost, and lower latency than GPUs. The company focuses on enabling applications like real-time video generation and advanced reasoning agents, and is backed by leading investors and engineers.