Systems Engineer

About the role We're building an AI accelerator chip, and the hard problems increasingly live in the seams — between the silicon, the firmware that brings it up, and the runtime and compiler that target it. This Systems Engineer owns those seams. You'll be responsible for how the whole system behaves, not any single block: defining interfaces between hardware and software, driving bring-up of first silicon, and being the person who can reason across the stack when a problem doesn't belong cleanly to any one team. What you'll do System architecture and interface definition — the contracts between hardware blocks, firmware, and the software runtime/compiler. You write and defend the spec the other teams build against Bring-up — lead first-silicon power-on and validation: boot sequence, clock/reset/power, basic functional checkout, then deeper characterization Hardware/software co-design — sit between the architecture team and the runtime/compiler team; make the trade-offs that keep both sides shippable System-level debug — own problems that cross the HW/SW boundary, where neither side's tools tell the whole story Integration and validation infrastructure — the harnesses, models, and test programs that exercise the system end-to-end (emulation/FPGA, post-silicon, or both) What we're looking for System-level thinking across HW and SW — you can read RTL or a testbench AND the firmware/driver that exercises it, and reason about where a bug actually lives C / C++ — production firmware, drivers, or low-level systems software Computer architecture fluency — pipelines, caches, memory hierarchy, interconnect/NoC, boot and power sequencing 5+ years building real systems where hardware and software meet — SoC bring-up, board/platform bring-up, firmware-on-silicon, or equivalent Hardware/software interface design — register maps, memory-mapped IO, interrupts, DMA, boot/handoff protocols Debug instinct across the boundary — logic analyzers, JTAG, trace, plus the software-side tooling. You're comfortable being the one who chases a problem from the runtime down to a waveform Full compensation packages are based on candidate experience and relevant certifications. California pay range $200,000 — $350,000 USD