Senior Physical Design Engineer, Annapurna Labs

Job Title

Senior Physical Design Engineer, Annapurna Labs

Role Summary

Join the Cloud-Scale Machine Learning Acceleration team to design and optimize custom SoCs and server hardware used in AWS machine learning infrastructure. The role focuses on physical implementation, sign-off, and methodology for high-performance ML inference and training systems.

Experience Level

Senior — typically requires significant hands-on ASIC physical design experience (around 6+ years delivering RTL-to-GDSII on advanced process nodes).

Responsibilities

Primary responsibilities include driving physical implementation and collaborating with architecture and RTL teams to achieve timing, power, and area targets.

• Work with RTL/logic designers to assess architectural feasibility and PPA (power-performance-area) tradeoffs.
• Lead physical implementation of IO/core subsystems and blocks: synthesis, floorplanning, pin/bus planning, place-and-route, and ECOs.
• Perform power and clock distribution design, congestion analysis, timing closure, and IR drop analysis through sign-off.
• Execute physical verification and support GDSII delivery and sign-off activities.
• Develop and improve physical design methodologies and flows.
• Evaluate third-party IP, define physical-domain requirements, and recommend integrations.
• Collaborate across teams and contribute to a startup-like engineering environment; mentor junior engineers as required.

Requirements

Concise list of required technical skills and desirable additions.

• Must-have: 6+ years hands-on ASIC physical design experience (RTL-to-GDSII) on advanced nodes (examples: 7nm, 14/16nm, 20nm, 28nm).
• Must-have: Practical experience across synthesis, equivalency verification, floor planning, pin/bus planning, place & route, power/clock distribution, congestion analysis, timing closure, IR drop analysis, physical verification, and ECO.
• Must-have: Experience with commercial EDA tools (Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, or similar).
• Must-have: Scripting proficiency in Python, Perl, Bash, or PowerShell.
• Nice-to-have: Experience mentoring or leading engineers and developing CAD flows (including formal verification flows).
• Nice-to-have: 4+ years integrating IP and specifying IP requirements; knowledge of device physics and custom/semi-custom implementation techniques.
• Nice-to-have: Experience with memory and interface technologies (DDR, PCIe, fabrics) and QOR metric extraction and trend analysis.

Education Requirements

BS plus 8 years of experience, or MS plus 6 years of experience, in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science (as specified in the posting).

About the Company

Company: Amazon Web Services

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington, USA

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a comprehensive and evolving cloud computing platform that includes infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). AWS allows business and developers to use a wide range of cloud services for computing power, storage, and content delivery, among others, thus fostering innovation and enabling faster deployment of applications. AWS is designed to be scalable, flexible, and cost-effective across industries worldwide.