Applied Research Engineer, Chip Design

NVIDIA NVIDIA · Semiconductors · Santa Clara, CA

Applied Research Engineer role focused on applying LLMs, coding agents, and agentic AI to core ASIC design problems like RTL generation, verification, and PPA prediction. The role involves hands-on experience with various AI techniques including RLHF, synthetic data generation, and evaluation, with a strong emphasis on delivering production-ready solutions within internal chip design schedules. Requires expertise in both front-end ASIC design and applying AI to these problems, with experience in building and maintaining infrastructure.

What you'd actually do

  1. Apply LLMs, coding agents, and agentic systems - to core ASIC design problems: RTL generation, Design and Formal verification, PPA prediction and optimization.
  2. Hands-on experience with LLMs, RL, RLHF/RLAIF, post-training, evaluation, graders, synthetic data, model training, coding agents, tool-using agents, and production ML systems
  3. Deliver against NVIDIA's internal chip design schedules and activities - your success is measured by how much faster the ASIC teams move, not by research output alone.
  4. Build robust data generation (including synthetic data) and meticulous evaluation methodology that separates working systems from demos and use evaluation to decide what to automate next.
  5. Wire coding agents and agentic AI into EDA and validation flows — simulation, regressions, waveform and log analysis, script generation — so engineers can drive complex tasks and cut ramp time.

Skills

Required

  • MS or PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field.
  • 8+ years of proven industry experience
  • Domain and technical expertise in front-end ASIC (design, verification, timing)
  • Project experience applying agentic AI to chip design and optimization problems
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-based agents or AI tooling
  • Experience with custom model training, fine-tuning, or post-training (SFT, RLHF/DPO) over proprietary technical data.
  • Experience building and maintaining infrastructure (Docker, Slurm, CI/CD, etc.).
  • Excellent written and verbal communication

Nice to have

  • context engineering
  • tool integration
  • orchestration
  • failure analysis
  • evaluation
  • self-motivation
  • creativity
  • passion for applied research
  • tight-knit collaboration skills
  • ability to work effectively within a team
  • presenting and explaining complex technical work

What the JD emphasized

  • track record of driving ideas from conception through experimentation to production
  • Hands-on experience building LLM-based agents or AI tooling that real users depend on
  • Experience with custom model training, fine-tuning, or post-training (SFT, RLHF/DPO) over proprietary technical data.

Other signals

  • applying AI to NVIDIA's real ASIC design flows
  • delivering against NVIDIA's internal chip design schedules
  • driving ideas from conception through experimentation to production