
Emulation & FPGA Prototyping Engineer at Voltai (Palo Alto, CA)
Voltai· Palo Alto, CA·
Role details
Job description
About Voltai
Voltai is developing world models, and agents to learn, evaluate, plan, experiment, and interact with the physical world. We are starting out with understanding and building hardware; electronics systems and semiconductors where AI can design and create beyond human cognitive limits.
About the Team
Backed by Silicon Valley’s top investors, Stanford University, and CEOs/Presidents of Google, AMD, Broadcom, Marvell, etc. We are a team of previous Stanford professors, SAIL researchers, Olympiad medalists (IPhO, IOI, etc.), the inventors of IC3 and the Murphi verification system, CTOs of Synopsys & GlobalFoundries, Head of Sales & CRO of Cadence, former US Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and Senior Foreign-Policy Advisor to four US presidents.
About this Role
You'll bring designs to life before silicon exists. You'll own emulation and FPGA prototyping on real silicon programs with leading semiconductor companies while helping Voltai's AI learn to debug at system scale.
What You’ll Do
- Build and maintain emulation and FPGA prototyping platforms for SoCs and subsystems.
- Map designs onto emulators and FPGAs, including partitioning and timing closure.
- Enable early software bring-up, system validation, and performance analysis.
- Debug complex hardware/software issues at system scale.
- Build automation for emulation compile, run, and triage.
- Generate system-level data that helps train and evaluate Voltai's models.
What We’re Looking For
- 5+ years of emulation or FPGA prototyping experience.
- Hands-on experience with Palladium, ZeBu, Veloce, or HAPS.
- Strong SystemVerilog and FPGA tooling (Vivado, Quartus) experience.
- Experience with hardware/software co-verification and debug.
- Python, Tcl, or C/C++ scripting.
Bonus Points
- Experience with transactors and hybrid emulation.
- Linux driver or firmware bring-up experience.
- Interest in AI-assisted design tools.
Why work at Voltai
- Culture: Emphasizes high-agency, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of AI and physical engineering. The team includes Olympiad medalists and former CTOs – a “smartest in the room” environment.
- Remote/hybrid policy: Fully remote (as indicated on Built In and LinkedIn). Employees work from the United States and Germany.
- Notable perks: Opportunity to work on frontier AI problems with direct impact on the semiconductor industry; access to unrivaled industry partners and compute resources.
- Engineering culture: Heavy focus on research engineering (CUDA, post-training, systems), with open roles for both software and hardware engineers. Emphasis on real-world validation and iterative experimentation.