Principal RTL Design Engineer

The era of pervasive AI has arrived. In this era, organizations will use generative AI to unlock hidden value in their data, accelerate processes, reduce costs, drive efficiency and innovation to fundamentally transform their businesses and operations at scale.

SambaNova Suite™ is the first full-stack, generative AI platform, from chip to model, optimized for enterprise and government organizations. Powered by the intelligent SN40L chip, the SambaNova Suite is a fully integrated platform, delivered on-premises or in the cloud, combined with state-of-the-art open-source models that can be easily and securely fine-tuned using customer data for greater accuracy. Once adapted with customer data, customers retain model ownership in perpetuity, so they can turn generative AI into one of their most valuable assets.

SambaNova's RDU is the processor behind our inference systems, and the RTL design team builds the blocks it's made of: compute datapath, on-chip network, and memory subsystems. The team owns microarchitecture through tape-out, including RTL implementation, PPA trade-offs, quality gates like lint, CDC, and LEC, and timing closure with physical design. Frequency targets are aggressive, so how a datapath gets pipelined and where area buys timing are decided here.

SambaNova Systems is looking for a Principal RTL Design Engineer to own the microarchitecture and RTL for a major block or subsystem of our next-generation Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit, the silicon behind our AI workload acceleration systems.

This is a senior individual-contributor role with real ownership. You'll take a block from microarchitecture specification through RTL, quality closure, and tape-out, and you'll own the power, performance, and area trade-offs along the way. Frequency targets here are aggressive, so the microarchitectural choices you make (how you pipeline a datapath, where you spend area to buy timing) are the substance of the job, not an afterthought.

You'll work alongside architects, design verification, and physical design engineers to converge functionality and timing, and with software and compiler teams to prototype features that move application-level performance. You'll be one of the engineers who sets the technical bar for digital design here: in reviews, in the methodology the team adopts, and in how the design flow evolves.

• Own microarchitecture and RTL implementation for a major block or subsystem of the RDU, from specification through tape-out

• Define and document microarchitecture specifications for complex digital blocks in compute, memory, or on-chip network subsystems

• Write, integrate, and debug synthesizable SystemVerilog RTL through the full chip implementation and production lifecycle

• Hit aggressive frequency targets through datapath pipelining, retiming, and microarchitectural restructuring

• Own PPA for your area: make and defend the power, performance, and area trade-offs using advanced techniques for high-speed design

• Drive timing closure with physical design: synthesis, STA, critical-path iteration, and response to floorplan and congestion feedback

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