---
title: 'Director, ASIC Verification at Netpreme'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-asic-verification-netpreme-santa-clara-j1nevr7g4076'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-20'
---

# Director, ASIC Verification at Netpreme

- **Company:** Netpreme
- **Location:** Santa Clara, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-20
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/netpreme/bf6c198b-8e48-459a-b472-b221661e2fd7

## Job description

## About the Role

We are seeking a Director of ASIC Verification who leads from the front: you'll own verification strategy, sign-off, and the team — and you'll also be one of the strongest hands-on verification engineers here, writing testbenches, closing coverage, and debugging the hardest failures. This role will be performed onsite from our office in Santa Clara, CA. Essential Duties & Responsibilities

- Own verification end-to-end: strategy, methodology (UVM, formal, emulation, coverage-driven closure), tape-out sign-off for Netpreme silicon, IP, subsystems and post silicon bringup support including test-vector generation.
- Architect and author verification environments and testplans, review testbench code line-by-line, and personally drive debug of the hardest protocol, coverage, and bring-up issues
- Recruit, lead, and develop a world-class verification organization that treats technical depth as the currency
- Present verification readiness, metrics, and risk posture to engineering leadership with conviction

## Qualifications

- BS/MS in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field.
- 8+ years of progressive ASIC/SOC verification, with 5+ years leading verification teams
- Demonstrable experience writing verification code, building testbenches, and closing coverage
- Multiple tapeouts in advanced process nodes where you owned both deep technical work and sign-off
- Hands-on experience with high-speed protocol IP — Ethernet, UCIe, UALink, or comparable
- Fluent across the full ASIC/SOC lifecycle — microarchitecture through tape-out — on designs integrating interconnect, I/O, and memory subsystems
- Executive communication skills; proven ability to manage risk, escalations, budget, and headcount on startup timelines

## Preferred Qualifications

- PhD in EE, CE, or related field
- Built a verification team from zero at an early-stage startup while delivering milestones personally
- Hands-on post-silicon bring-up, debug, and validation leadership
- AI/datacenter accelerator background; familiarity with LLM memory/dataloader bottlenecks
- Knowledge of DFT and its interaction with front-end verification

## Compensation & Benefits

- Competitive salary with performance-based bonus and early-stage equity grant
- 100% employer-paid Health, Dental, and Vision coverage for you and your dependents
- 401(k) match with immediate vesting, and access to financial advisors to help you reach your financial goals
- 100% employer-paid Life, Disability, and AD&D insurance, plus a fitness stipend and wellness & mental health perks
- Generous PTO: 20 vacation days, 15 company holidays (including 3 floating days of your choosing)
- Daily lunch stipend
- Enterprise-level Claude & ChatGPT access with a generous token budget
- Well-equipped, sunny offices in Santa Clara, CA & Cambridge, MA with on-site parking and EV charging; on-site fitness center in Santa Clara; gym discounts near our Cambridge office
- Visa sponsorship and relocation assistance to one of our office hubs
- A collaborative, continuous-learning environment with smart, dedicated colleagues building the next generation of high-performance computing architecture

The Opportunity

- Impact: Humanity stands at the dawn of a new industrial revolution driven by AI—one with the potential to redefine how we live on this planet. We are tackling a fundamental challenge at the infrastructure layer: unlocking greater AI capability while dramatically improving efficiency. The work we do here compounds across state-of-the-art AI models, systems, and real-world applications.
- Timing: Breakthrough technology matters most when it meets the right time. Joining now means real ownership of the company and meaningful influence over product direction and execution. In this early-stage environment, your ideas shape the trajectory of the technology—not just its implementation. You’ll work from first principles, move quickly from insight to execution, and see your contributions directly reflected in what we build.
- Culture: You’ll work alongside a group of people who care deeply about rigor, clarity, and impact. We value thoughtful disagreement, fast learning, and intellectual fearlessness. This is a place where strong ideas shine, curiosity is encouraged, and growth is a daily practice—not a future promise.

## About Netpreme

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Netpreme is building the world's first Memory Processing Unit (MPU) and Networked Memory Tiering™ technology to solve the memory capacity bottleneck for AI accelerators.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Stealth/Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States (with a second office in Santa Clara, California)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Nikita Lazarev (Co-Founder and CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Semiconductor design, AI infrastructure, high-performance networking, computer architecture
- Target customers: B2B, specifically AI/ML infrastructure providers, hyperscalers, and enterprises deploying large-scale AI models
- Mission or purpose statement: "Our mission is to build and pioneer the next-gen memory processing systems that augments AI accelerators memory capacity by 1000x or more." [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/about)

## Products & Services
- **[X-Mem™ Networked Memory Tiering™]**: A hardware-software solution that integrates with existing systems using standard interfaces, working transparently with ML systems to extend XPU memory capacity by 100x. The core technology is the **Memory Processing Unit (MPU)**, a new class of chip designed to create a high-bandwidth, low-latency memory fabric for AI workloads. [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private company, likely early-stage)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – Not disclosed; backed by "a group of visionary partners" [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/about). Investors include Calvin Chin (Board Member) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netpreme).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Calvin Chin (Investor/Board Member); the company lists "industry leaders" as partners for bringing X-Mem technology to market. [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/)
- **Growth Signals**: Rapidly growing team (12 employees as of mid-2025, with +8.3% monthly growth); website traffic growing +170.9% month-over-month; active hiring with 7 open positions [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netpreme). The company is tackling a fundamental, well-recognized bottleneck in AI compute.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover on a new chip category**: Netpreme is pioneering the "Memory Processing Unit" (MPU), a dedicated chip class that sits between compute and memory, unlike competitors who rely on software-only or incremental hardware approaches.
- **Fundamental approach**: They are solving the memory wall problem at the infrastructure layer, which compounds across all state-of-the-art AI models and systems. Their technology promises a 100x memory extension, which is a step-change improvement over existing solutions.
- **Expert team**: The team includes world-class experts from top institutions (MIT, Stanford, Apple, Google) in semiconductor design, computer architecture, high-performance networking, and AI systems [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/about) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netpreme).

## Strategic Focus
- **Build the fastest memory-to-compute fabric**: The company's immediate priority is developing and tapeouting its ASIC (the MPU) and the accompanying software stack (ML kernels, performance models, inference systems).
- **Enable next-gen AI inference**: They are specifically designing systems for LLM inference with expandable distributed memory, targeting the critical bottleneck that limits model size and context windows.
- **Hire founding team members**: With 7 active job postings for "Member of Technical Staff" roles across ASIC design, verification, architecture, ML systems, performance modeling, and ML kernels, the company is actively building its core technical team [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/netpreme).

## Why Work Here
- **Impact at the infrastructure layer**: The company is solving "a fundamental challenge" that directly enables more powerful AI. Work done here has multiplicative effects across the entire AI ecosystem.
- **Ownership and speed**: As an early-stage startup, employees "work from first principles, move quickly from insight to execution," and see their contributions directly reflected in what they build. The culture emphasizes "rigor, clarity, and impact."
- **Culture of intellectual fearlessness**: The company values "thoughtful disagreement, fast learning, and intellectual fearlessness," making it ideal for engineers and researchers who want to push boundaries.
- **Location flexibility**: Offices in both **Cambridge, MA** (near MIT/Harvard) and **Santa Clara, CA** (in the heart of Silicon Valley), offering a choice of two major tech hubs. Roles are listed as on-site/hybrid.
- **Team pedigree**: Work alongside experts from MIT, Stanford, Apple, Google, and SpaceX [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netpreme).

## Sources
1. [netpreme.com](https://netpreme.com/)
2. [netpreme.com/about](https://netpreme.com/about)
3. [netpreme.com/careers](https://netpreme.com/careers)
4. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/netpreme)
5. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/netpreme)

## Other roles at Netpreme

- [Member of Technical Staff, Performance Modeling](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-performance-modeling-netpreme-santa-clara-ca-or-boston-7ad8e7g54bzn) — Santa Clara CA OR Boston, MA
- [IT & Infrastructure Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/it-infrastructure-lead-netpreme-santa-clara-mgaegqyzna4j) — Santa Clara, CA
- [Member of Technical Staff, ASIC Verification](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-asic-verification-netpreme-santa-clara-ca-or-boston-mv9bpsjbpwwa) — Santa Clara CA OR Boston, MA
- [Member of Technical Staff, ASIC Design](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-asic-design-netpreme-santa-clara-1dgpe9zd4905) — Santa Clara, CA