Job Description
With the recent rise of AI, the chip design industry is rapidly modernizing their development cycle in order to take advantage of efficiency gains. ChipStack is targeting the largest chunk of time in the chip development lifecycle: verification.
Every time a chip design company does a tape-out at a leading edge foundry it can cost $50M-100M. For this reason, the chip design industry spends roughly 18 months out of a 24 month design cycle doing nothing other than verifying their chip design.
Our founding team is fast moving and marries the worlds of chip design, machine learning, and software engineering. We’re backed by top investors including Khosla Ventures, Cerberus, and Clear Ventures, and we have already deployed with 10+ customers ranging from Fortune 100s to cutting-edge AI silicon startups.
What this role looks likeTo start with, there is no live on-call. With that out of the way…
This is an opportunity for you to bring your general skills and decide where you’d like to specialize as we grow. In a nutshell, your job here at ChipStack will be top to bottom ownership of the problems that you take on:
Fact finding internally and/or with customers
Requirements decisions
Coordination with other project leads
Implementation of solutions
This is a lot of work, with a lot of hats to wear simultaneously. While in the short term your job will cover a significant amount of product lifecycle, keep in mind you are also at the beginning of a significant hiring wave.
The pay off for joining right now is that in the medium term you will be an intimate part of the hiring process. You will be helping to determine which of those hats you enjoy and which you would like to bring on other engineers to enjoy.
Boring technical details:
Infrastructure: Terraform and Docker
Backend: Python
CLI frontend: Python
VS Code extension frontend: TypeScript/React
6+ years of experience as a software engineer. This is not a hard requirement, but time is a significant factor in developing the skills, both technical and not, to effectively own the breadth of responsibility that this position demands.
Fluency with Docker or other OCI runtime alternatives
Fluency with React and/or Python
Comfort directly coordinating with end users and stakeholders
You thrive on ownership of your work, with all of the freedom and responsibility that comes with it.
You’re interested in complex problems and constraints.
You invest in your packaging and deployment as deeply as the software you are writing.
You enjoy coordinating directly with end users and the various other stakeholders at our customers.
You have developed the healthy paranoia that only a seasoned software engineer could.
In no particular order…
Experience at early-stage startups
Experience shipping software in on-prem, enterprise environments
Prior success with direct customer support
Fluency with Python packaging
Fluency with VS Code extension development
Comfort working with various enterprise Linux distros
Prior experience in building LLM-based applications
Culture fit is important for anyone joining an early-stage team. Below are our core tenets.
Challenge status quo: We are innovators who can challenge the status quo and push forward our vision of the world.
Strong opinions, loosely held: We are low on ego, but high on collaboration. We are okay to be wrong and are always open to learning.
Ship fast, ship quality: We ruthlessly prioritize what matters. We build a few things, but at lightning speed with high quality.
Proud of our craft: Attention to detail is in our DNA. We take pride in what we build and ensure they exceed the high standards of the semiconductor industry.