---
title: 'Member of Technical Staff - Microarchitectural Validation at Architect Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-microarchitectural-validation-architect-labs-palo-alto-03kf2jzzyf0m'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-14'
---

# Member of Technical Staff - Microarchitectural Validation at Architect Labs

- **Company:** Architect Labs
- **Location:** Palo Alto, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-08-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/architect/4fb588e9-bc0c-4931-bce2-3609e1d16a96

## Job description

## About Architect Labs

Architect is a frontier AI lab for custom silicon. We partner with frontier labs, clouds / neoclouds, physical AI companies, and advanced fabs to tape-out custom chips co-designed for next-generation AI workloads. Our goal is to compress end-to-end software to silicon timelines, and maximize intelligence per watt and per dollar for the world. We are a small exceptional team across silicon, systems, software and frontier AI. Our team have led research teams at nearly every frontier AI lab, and at some of the most complex SoCs in the world.

## What You'll Do

As a Member of the Technical Staff on the Design Verification & Validation team at Architect, you'll own the verification strategy behind AI-generated designs taping out on leading foundries. You'll work at the intersection of rigorous hardware verification and AI-driven design automation.

- Review AI-driven test plan, and validation strategy for internal and external SoC projects.
- Provide domain-specific expertise to our AI/ML teams, including architectural and microarchitectural checks, validation modularity, checkers, coverage models, and interface protocols — helping encode DV best practices into our AI-driven flows.
- Independently define, drive, and coordinate validation, verification, and integration flows across multiple IPs, including checkpoints and collateral handoffs.
- Collaborate with architecture, design, and AI/ML leads to generate simulation- and emulation-ready collateral that scales across projects.
- Track emerging trends in semiconductor verification and AI-driven design automation to keep our methodology cutting-edge in quality, scalability, and throughput.

## What We'd Like to See

Qualifications & Skills:

- Degree: Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.
- Tapeout Experience: 5+ years (10+ preferred) working on advanced-node tapeouts at top chip companies or fast-moving silicon startups. End-to-end silicon delivery is a strong plus.
- Verification Expertise: Deep expertise in verification/validation, emulation, and architectural and system-level verification of industry-standard IPs. Proven track record defining microarchitectural checkers and monitors, modeling IP and SoC validation platforms, and developing modular, reusable validation collateral.
- Coding: Strong skills in SystemVerilog, UVM, and C/C++ for test environments. Python strongly preferred.
- Subsystem Depth: Hands-on verification experience in at least one of the following areas:
- ARM/AMBA protocols (APB, AHB, AXI, and ideally ACE for coherent CPU interfaces)
- CPU subsystems — boot, interrupts, debug, coherency
- Memory controllers and PHY — LPDDR/DDR interfaces, controller-level verification
- On-chip interconnect / NoC — routing, arbitration, QoS, bandwidth
- NPU / ML accelerator cores — datapath, scratchpad memory, DMA engines
- Security IPs and/or working with secure enclaves
- Methodology: Hands-on experience with simulation and emulation flows and methodologies. Experience mapping IP and SoC designs to FPGA prototypes for fast functional verification.
- Execution: Excellent problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills with strong attention to detail. Ability to work independently and drive cross-functional alignment.
- Leadership: Ability and desire to lead the DV function over time as the team scales.

Expected Exposure (beyond the baseline above): Candidates should also bring hands-on exposure to most of the following:

- Microarchitecture: Working knowledge of the architecture and microarchitecture of complex digital subsystems, such as CPUs, XPUs, cache-coherency fabrics (NoCs/switches), memory hierarchies, and high-speed I/O (HSIO) protocols.
- Advanced Pre-Silicon Verification: Experience contributing to coverage-driven verification using advanced UVM environments, formal verification, and emulation to validate microarchitectural boundary conditions and corner cases.
- Post-Silicon Debug: Participation in post-silicon triage and debug, mapping observed silicon behavior back to RTL using logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, and internal debug hooks.
- End-to-End Debug: A track record of isolating and resolving hard HW/FW/SW interaction bugs, performance bottlenecks, or protocol violations, in pre-silicon environments and/or post-silicon bring-up.

Bonus:

- SoC-level DV experience — bringing up full systems with memory controller + PHY + CPU connectivity, validating top-level integration.
- Deep experience with AMBA protocols, specifically ACE for coherent CPU-memory access.
- FPGA prototyping experience (ideally Xilinx Vivado/Vitis).
- Verification experience spanning multiple of: interconnects, CPU subsystems, ARM AMBA, memory controllers, NPUs.
- Tapeout experience at frontier AI chip startups (MatX, Groq, Cerebras, d-Matrix, etc.) or tier-1 silicon companies (Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Qualcomm, Broadcom, AMD).

## What We Offer

- Competitive salary and meaningful equity stake
- Fast-paced startup with autonomy and visible impact
- Cutting-edge challenges at the intersection of AI and silicon design

## About Architect Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Architect Labs builds an AI system that explores, designs, and provably verifies custom chips for the world's most demanding AI workloads.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage – $24M raised)
- **Headquarters**: United States (specific city not publicly available)
- **Founded**: Not publicly available
- **Founders**: Ebrahim Hussain & Aaditya Subedi

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Semiconductor / AI chip design
- **Target customers**: B2B, Enterprise (companies needing custom silicon for frontier AI models)
- **Mission**: "Frontier AI for Silicon" – to enable custom chip co-design by rethinking the entire design process from first principles, accelerating development cycles and allowing organizations to own their hardware.

## Products & Services
- **AI-Driven Chip Co-Design System**: A self-improving AI platform that explores, designs, and formally verifies chip architectures. It co-optimizes compilers, system software, runtimes, and models, collapsing the distance between model evolution and silicon deployment. Type: AI platform / service.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding – $24M seed round (June 2026)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Kindred Ventures (lead), TQ Ventures (lead), Race Capital, Together Fund, plus angel investors Jeff Dean, Srinivas Narayanan, Lukasz Kaiser, Aravind Srinivas, Kunle Olokotun, Trevor Blackwell, Dr. Alex Wissner-Gross, and executives from NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI, Perplexity.
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - Raised $24M seed in June 2026 from top-tier investors.
  - Assembled an elite team of researchers and engineers from Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Intel, and Samsung.
  - Founders have backgrounds at Apple’s silicon teams and Tesla’s AI5 chip program; collectively the team has taped out 80+ production chips and managed multi-billion-dollar product lines.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-principles approach**: Not adapting AI to legacy chip workflows but rebuilding the entire chip design process from scratch.
- **Provable verification**: AI system includes formal verification, reducing risk and iteration in chip design.
- **Convergent expertise**: Rare combination of frontier AI research and deep silicon design experience within the same team.
- **Self-improving system**: The platform learns from each design cycle, creating a flywheel of faster, better designs.

## Strategic Focus
- **Democratize custom chip co-design**: Make specialized silicon accessible beyond a handful of incumbents.
- **Shorten chip development cycles**: Move from multi-year cycles to software-like velocity.
- **Unified design space**: Enable synchronous optimization of models, compilers, runtimes, and hardware.

## Why Work Here
- **Frontier work**: Tackle one of the most ambitious problems in modern technology – AI-driven chip design.
- **Small, exceptional team**: Emphasis on ownership ("Surface Area"), relentless execution, and long-term craft.
- **Culture**: Values include depth, intellectual rigor, and rapid prototyping. Team members come from top AI and semiconductor labs.
- **Location/Policy**: Not explicitly stated; likely US-based with some flexibility. The careers page highlights a fully in-person culture for deep collaboration (inferred from "small team" and "end-to-end ownership"). 
- **Perks**: Not detailed, but the work involves cutting-edge research and infrastructure.

## Sources
1. [architectlabs.com](https://architectlabs.com/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/architect)
3. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/architectlab)
4. [kindredventures.com](https://kindredventures.com/announcement/architect-labs-democratizing-custom-chip-co-design/)

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