GPU Physical Design Engineer - Austin, United States
Originally posted 1 October 2026 by the employer.
Work on physical design for GPU partitions and designs.
About the role
This role involves driving physical aspects of chip architecture and optimizing for performance, power, and area (PPA). The work focuses on GPU designs in the latest technological nodes.
What you'll do
- Work with front-end teams to understand chip architecture and drive physical aspects early in the design cycle.
- Drive best-in-class physical design construction and optimization recipes for performance, power, and area (PPA).
- Drive methodologies and guidelines to streamline physical design work and supervise progress.
- Lead and resolve design and flow issues related to physical design, identifying potential solutions.
- Optimize low power design techniques such as clock gating, custom clock construction, power gating, and multi-voltage technique threshold strategies.
What you'll need
- Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Electronics Engineering or Electrical Engineering or related field and 3 years of experience in physical design.
- Experience utilizing industry standard automated place and route tools such as Cadence-Innovus.
- Experience working with front-end teams to provide IP feedback to improve timing and congestion.
- Expertise in multi-voltage and power gated designs to handle low power design requirements.
- Experience with hierarchical design approach to handle multiple instantiated designs in PNR, including budgeting and floor planning.
- Experience designing large GPU designs (>20M gates) with frequencies in excess of 1GHz.
- Proficiency in scripting languages such as TCL or Python to automate physical design tasks and develop utilities.
- Experience integrating IP from internal and external vendors and driving IP requirements in the physical domain.
- Experience with process-related design issues in lower tech nodes, including Design for Yield and manufacturability.
Skills: place and route, Cadence-Innovus, GPU designs, low power design, TCL or Python scripting
This role has been open 8 days — well below the 60-day median for Physical Design roles.
Physical Design · Physical Design
|
Open roles in category
671
|
Median days open
60 d
|
Median salary
$185k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Apple | All employers we track in this specialty (671 roles · 78 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 15 | 671 |
| Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family | 36 | 1485 · 107 employers |
| Median days open | 18 d | 60 d (−42 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $185k |
Skills observed across this category: place and route, Cadence-Innovus, GPU designs, low power design, TCL or Python scripting
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 130 open roles · median 38 d
- AMD · 59 open roles · median 21 d
- NVIDIA · 42 open roles · median 63 d
- Broadcom · 38 open roles · median 88 d
- Synopsys · 35 open roles · median 39 d
- Micron Technology · 25 open roles · median 78 d
How we counted: 671 open Physical Design (Physical Design) roles from 78 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 9 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Physical Implementation family row. Figures refresh nightly.