Voltai

Formal Verification Research Scientist at Voltai (Palo Alto, CA)

Voltai· Palo Alto, CA·

Role details

Employment
Full-Time

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.), 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

In this role, you’ll develop new formal verification methods to enable formal proofs of design correctness using model checking, property verification, and equivalence analysis. You’ll collaborate closely with RTL, verification, and ML research teams to develop hybrid formal engines that reason about AI-generated hardware at scale. You’ll define formal properties, automate assertion synthesis, and build systems that verify at the speed of thought. You will prototype research ideas, evaluate them on real RTL designs, and work closely with RTL, ML, and verification teams to turn novel methods into practical systems.

You might thrive if you have 5+ years of experience in

  • Research experience in formal methods, theorem proving, model checking, or program analysis
  • JasperGold, VC Formal, or similar formal verification tools
  • Assertion-based verification (SVA)
  • Model checking and property decomposition
  • Equivalence checking, abstraction refinement, and formal coverage

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.

Application questions