Silicon Engineer

About Anthropic

Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. We want AI to be safe and beneficial for our users and for society as a whole. Our team is a quickly growing group of committed researchers, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders working together to build beneficial AI systems.

About the role

Anthropic runs some of the largest AI training and inference workloads in the world, across multiple hardware platforms. We work from the chip level up with our silicon partners, and we are now deepening that investment by building a custom silicon team.

You will be one of a small number of people covering a large surface. We are opening searches across the key domains below, and we are interested in candidates whose center of gravity sits in any of them:

Front-end design

Pre-silicon verification

Physical design

Design for test

Analog and mixed-signal

Technology and foundry

CAD and design infrastructure

Packaging, signal integrity, and power integrity

This is a role for someone who has shipped silicon, has a realistic relationship with schedules, and is comfortable making consequential calls without a large organization behind them. 

Key responsibilities

Take part in end to end activities for the program: strategy, specification, execution and the technical bar.

Write the specifications and interface definitions that others design against and keep them coherent as the architecture converges

Make and own directional calls: technology and IP selection, where we build versus buy versus license, and where we take design authority versus rely on partners

Build and share AI-assisted approaches to the code-like parts of your domain, and help the team learn what Claude can genuinely accelerate

Contribute to the architecture and micro-architecture discussion from your domain's perspective, including the tradeoffs your area imposes on the rest of the chip

Partner with Anthropic's inference, performance, kernels, and infrastructure teams on hardware-software co-design, and with our hardware systems team on bring-up and integration

Support first-silicon bring-up and debug when it arrives, regardless of which domain you came in through

Minimum qualifications

Deep, hands-on expertise in at least one silicon domain: front-end design, pre-silicon verification, physical design, design for test, analog and mixed-signal, technology and foundry, design infrastructure, or packaging and signal/power integrity

Direct personal contribution to silicon that taped out and shipped, with ownership you can speak to in detail

Working fluency in the domains adjacent to your own, sufficient to reason about chip-level tradeoffs outside your specialty

Experience working with external partners — ASIC houses, IP vendors, foundries, or test partners — including reviewing their work and holding a technical bar

Track record of owning directional technical decisions and their consequences, not only making recommendations

Practical experience using AI coding tools in your own work, and clear ideas about where they help and where they do not

Clear written and verbal communication, and experience driving alignment across teams and organizations

Comfort operating with high autonomy and little scaffolding on a highly dynamic program

Preferred qualifications

Experience on machine learning accelerators, high-performance compute, or other large, high-bandwidth designs

Experience on a founding or early-stage silicon team, including standing up flows, methodology, or tooling from nothing

Experience with both partner-executed and fully in-house programs, and a view on the tradeoffs between them

Familiarity with the chip-package-system interface and the tradeoffs that cross it

Experience with hardware-software co-design and working directly with compiler, kernel, or runtime teams

Experience building or extending AI-assisted design, verification, or physical d …