--- title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Voltai' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-voltai-palo-alto-w0zz0fy01p0a' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-08' --- # Forward Deployed Engineer at Voltai - **Company:** Voltai - **Location:** Palo Alto, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-08-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/voltai.careers/d9d062d6-bfd1-4194-9a7c-22f7b546f3c5 ## Job description This role is on-site in our San Francisco office (Atherton near Palo Alto) or hybrid in our New York City office. ## The Role You'll deliver our AI platform the world's foremost semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, and partner with them to develop new features. (This is not an exaggeration.) ## About Voltai Voltai is developing models and agents to evaluate, design, and interact with hardware and electronic systems. The Team We're hackers, researchers, and operators obsessed with building AI for electronic systems and semiconductors. Our team includes former Stanford professors, SAIL researchers, Olympiad medalists, and executives from Synopsys, GlobalFoundries, and Cadence. Despite the name drops, we care far more about execution than titles. We're backed by Stanford, Sequoia, and leadership at Google, AMD, Broadcom and more. In other words, we have deep, deep access to the industry. ## What You'll Do - Own customer deployments at offices across the SF Bay Area, Cupertino, and Santa Clara. - Develop features and integrations specific to customer workflows and port features from our cloud product to on-prem environments inside some of the most locked-down infrastructure on the planet. - Manage cloud deployments across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OpenShift: standing them up, keeping them healthy, debugging them when they're not. - Learn about hardware design. Previous experience is not expected, but you should be eager to familiarize yourself with how hardware is developed at a high-level. ## What We're Looking For - We care about how you think, not how you keyword-match - 5+ years in backend engineering, full-stack development, or infrastructure/DevOps: internships and teaching assistantships don't count - Familiarity with agent development and RAG - Fluency in at least one mainstream backend language (Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, etc.) and familiarity with either Python or TypeScript - Comfortable with the Docker ecosystem, cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), and IaC tools - Willingness to travel, mostly in California Bonus Points For - On-prem deployment experience in enterprise or air-gapped environments - Prior field engineering, solutions engineering, or customer-facing technical roles - Experience in EDA, semiconductor, or hardware-adjacent software environments Our AI Bullshit Meter We are very good at catching people who use AI to exaggerate their abilities whether on paper or during interviews. Please don't waste our time. - ## About Voltai ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Voltai develops AI models and agentic systems that learn, plan, and experiment to design PCBs, ASICs, and other semiconductor/electronics hardware, aiming to surpass human cognitive limits in physical-world engineering. - **Entity Type**: Private (Seed-stage – pre-seed funding round reported in October 2025) - **Headquarters**: Palo Alto, United States (also has presence in Germany) - **Founded**: 2015 (as per Tracxn; recent operational activity suggests a more current iteration) - **Founders**: Not publicly named as co-founders; current CEO is Priyanka Mathikshara (per Tracxn), CSO is Labib Tazwar Rahman (per LinkedIn). The team includes former Stanford professors, SAIL researchers, and alumni from Synopsys, GlobalFoundries, and Cadence. ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI for semiconductor and electronics design (hardware design automation) - **Target customers**: B2B – the world’s largest semiconductor companies, consumer electronics makers, automotive OEMs, and sovereign nations - **Mission or purpose statement**: To build superintelligent systems that can reason across the entire hardware-software-manufacturing stack, enabling the next frontier of physical-world engineering. ## Products & Services - **[Voltai AI Platform]**: A suite of AI models and agents that co-design electronics and semiconductors. The system uses world models to run billions of virtual experiments, bypassing the prohibitive cost and time of physical prototyping. Outputs include PCB layouts, ASIC designs, and manufacturing blueprints. (Type: AI/ML SaaS with physical verification) ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed - **Key Metric**: Raised CAD$1.83M in pre-seed funding in October 2025 from Invest Nova Scotia, Cloudberry Pioneer Investments, and others (conflicting with Tracxn’s “unfunded” status – see Sources). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Backed by “Silicon Valley’s top investors”, Stanford University, and executives/CEOs of Google, AMD, and Broadcom (per website). Strategic partners include major semiconductor and consumer electronics firms. - **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew ~600% YoY (from very small base); currently 3–4 employees with 27 active job postings (as of mid-2026). Website claims partnerships with “most of the world’s largest semiconductor companies” and sovereign nations. ## Competitive Advantages - **Domain-specific foundation models**: Unlike general-purpose AI, Voltai’s models are trained on proprietary real-world hardware data and can reason over long horizons (months-to-years design cycles). - **World model simulation**: Runs billions of experiments in silico, a unique capability that reduces the need for costly physical tape-outs. - **Elite talent pool**: Team includes former CTOs of Synopsys and GlobalFoundries, a former US Secretary of Defense, and Olympic medalists (IPhO, IOI) – an unusually deep combination of AI research and semiconductor executive experience. - **Board-level strategic priority**: Already has commitments from top-tier semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, including sovereign nations, giving it rare access and validation. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Scaling the AI platform to cover the full electronics stack (from PCB to ASIC to manufacturing); hiring aggressively across research (post-training, CUDA kernel engineering), hardware engineering (system, power, server), and enterprise sales; expanding partnerships with global semiconductor leaders. ## Why Work Here - **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. ## Sources 1. [voltai.com](https://www.voltai.com/) 2. [LinkedIn – Voltai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/voltai-inc) 3. [Built In – Voltai Careers](https://builtin.com/company/voltai) 4. [Tracxn – Voltai Company Profile](https://tracxn.com/d/companies/voltai/__HV-xuXnVpXmBMrSANdeEmHzMlZPWefz9YZpOVAklfDE) 5. [FinSMEs – Voltai Raises CAD$1.83M in Pre-Seed Funding](https://www.finsmes.com) (referenced in search snippet) 6. [Ashby – Voltai Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/voltai.careers) ## Other roles at Voltai - [Senior Software Engineer: Integrations](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-integrations-voltai-palo-alto-1hcvbf26z2be) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Software Engineer: Deployments](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-deployments-voltai-palo-alto-br4cv0vke60x) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Software Engineer: Solutions](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-solutions-voltai-palo-alto-54pkdyvj2ytr) — Palo Alto, CA - [Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-forward-deployed-engineer-fde-voltai-palo-alto-wcd45e35bzdy) — Palo Alto, CA - [Formal Verification Research Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/formal-verification-research-scientist-voltai-palo-alto-vp68m7n7gx8x) — Palo Alto, CA - [Strategic Projects Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-projects-lead-voltai-menlo-park-kx0n2cwm9v1b) — Menlo Park, CA - [Special Projects](https://feeny.ai/job/special-projects-voltai-palo-alto-7vwkwgaa9mrw) — Palo Alto, CA - [BizOps](https://feeny.ai/job/bizops-voltai-palo-alto-yrh95rerpt24) — Palo Alto, CA - [Computational Scientist](https://feeny.ai/job/computational-scientist-voltai-palo-alto-8zvf4rj7j436) — Palo Alto, CA - [Field Application Engineer (Europe)](https://feeny.ai/job/field-application-engineer-europe-voltai-remote-88smqh47r0zn)