About
Building a chip takes hundreds of engineers and years of work. Physical design – the placement, routing, and timing of transistors – is one of the hardest stages: thousands of interdependent decisions, sparse domain data, and no general-purpose AI that understands circuit structure. This role exists to change that.
This is an early-stage startup backed by top EU investors, building an AI reasoning system for physical chip design. You'd be the first AI hire, working directly alongside the co-founding team and a founding chip design architect.
What you'll do
- Design and build AI reasoning systems that understand circuit structure and make design decisions autonomously
- Build post-training pipelines – fine-tuning, reward modelling, and feedback-driven learning on proprietary chip design data
- Develop synthetic data generation strategies for a domain with limited open-source examples
- Drive data strategy, model architecture, and inference optimisation across the full AI system
- Work directly with the founding chip design architect to understand problem structure and translate it into training signals
- Shape technical direction alongside the founders – framing problems, proposing approaches, designing experiments
What you'll need
- Deep, hands-on experience building AI systems for hard, novel problem domains – reasoning, mathematics, biology, physics, or similar
- Ability to build reasoning models from scratch: post-training, RL, fine-tuning, data strategy – not just deploying existing pipelines
- Strong fundamentals across model architecture, training dynamics, and inference optimisation
- First-principles mindset: given a new structured problem, you can understand it and build an AI system to solve it
- Startup mindset: comfortable with ambiguity, able to move fast without a large team behind you
Optional Bonus
- Experience with symbolic reasoning, graph-structured data, or formal methods
- Background in post-training for reasoning or maths-style models
- Synthetic data generation for low-data domains
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted within 48 hours.
