Lead RTL Design Engineer - Sunnyvale, CA, United States
Digital Design & SoC Architecture
$200,000 - $299,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 23 July 2026 by the employer.
About the role
What you'll do
- Drive all aspects of chip design, including Functional Specification, Micro-architecture, RTL development, Synthesis.
- Manage external ASIC vendor through product development cycle.
- Work closely with Physical Design (PD) team members for design closure to meet PPA goals.
- Collaborate with Design Verification and DFT teams for achieving functional and test coverage.
- Work with software and system teams to understand opportunities to deliver optimal performance and feature set.
- Debug silicon-level functional, timing, and power issues during bring up.
What you'll need
- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent.
- 8-15 years of experience in delivering complex, high performance high quality RTL designs.
- Experience with Front End Chip integration and third-party IP integration.
- Demonstrated experience in networking, high-performance computing, machine learning or related fields.
- Proven track record of multiple silicon success.
- Experience collaborating and managing external vendors.
- Experience with designing/integrating high speed IO.
- Networking stack experience including TCP/IP, RDMA and Ethernet.
- Knowledge of PCIe, CPU interfaces and Serdes technology.
- Working knowledge of scripting tools: Python, TCL.
Nice to have
- Experience with FPGA development toolchain, including Place and Route, Floor planning and Timing Analysis.
Market context
This role has been open 84 days — well above the 61-day median for Digital/RTL Design roles.
Digital/RTL Design · RTL Design
|
Open roles in category
1036
|
Median days open
61 d
|
Median salary
$185k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Cerebras | All employers we track in this specialty (1036 roles · 103 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 2 | 1036 |
| Open roles in the wider Digital Design & Verification family | 6 | 3201 · 115 employers |
| Median days open | 54 d | 61 d (−7 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $185k |
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 140 open roles · median 65 d
- Synopsys · 86 open roles · median 33 d
- AMD · 71 open roles · median 39 d
- Analog Devices · 47 open roles · median 51 d
- NVIDIA · 42 open roles · median 61 d
- NXP Semiconductors · 42 open roles · median 87 d
How we counted: 1036 open Digital/RTL Design (RTL Design) roles from 103 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 19 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 Digital Design & Verification family row. Figures refresh nightly.