Senior Physical Design Engineer - United States
Originally posted 8 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role involves physical design methodology activities for GPUs and SOCs. You will contribute to product lines ranging from consumer graphics to self-driving cars and artificial intelligence.
What you'll do
- Perform physical design activities including floor plans, abstract view generation, RC extraction, PNR, STA, EMIR DROP, DRCs, and schematic to layout verification.
- Collaborate with the design team to address design challenges and debug tool/design-related issues.
- Improve the RTL2GDS flow to enhance PPA.
- Troubleshoot a wide variety of difficult design issues and apply proactive intervention.
- Write TCL/Python scripts to support design teams.
- Build flows based on industry-standard EDA tools to implement designs efficiently and improve PPA.
What you'll need
- 3+ years of experience in Physical Design, preferably with methodology/flow experience.
- Strong understanding of the RTL2GDSII flow or design implementation in leading process technologies.
- Good understanding of RTL2GDSII concepts related to synthesis, place & route, CTS, timing convergence, and layout closure.
- Expertise on high frequency design methodologies.
- Good knowledge and experience in Block-level and Full-chip Floor-planning and Physical verification.
- Working experience with tools like ICC2/Innovus, Primetime/Tempus/Seahawk.
- Strong knowledge and experience in standard place and route flows.
- Well versed with timing constraints, STA, IR and ECO timing closure.
- Strong algorithmic thinking with automation skills in PERL, TCL, tool specific scripting.
Nice to have
- ICC2/Synopsys and Innovus/Cadence flows experience.
- Python scripting experience.
Skills: physical design, RTL2GDSII, floor plans, place & route, timing convergence, DRC
This role has been open 3 days — well below the 61-day median for Physical Design roles.
Physical Design · Physical Design
|
Open roles in category
673
|
Median days open
61 d
|
Median salary
$185k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (673 roles · 78 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 40 | 673 |
| Open roles in the wider Physical Implementation family | 88 | 1470 · 107 employers |
| Median days open | 65 d | 61 d (+4 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $185k |
Skills observed across this category: physical design, RTL2GDSII, floor plans, place & route, timing convergence, DRC
Who's hiring in this category
- Qualcomm · 126 open roles · median 43 d
- AMD · 62 open roles · median 19 d
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 41 open roles · median 65 d
- Broadcom · 35 open roles · median 90 d
- Synopsys · 35 open roles · median 41 d
- Intel Corporation · 29 open roles · median 11 d
How we counted: 673 open Physical Design (Physical Design) roles from 78 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 11 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.