Physical Design - CAD
US$180,000 – US$260,000 / yr base salary
Posted 20 Feb 2026
Advertised as “Physical Design - CAD Lead”
BranchFactor Summary
The original posting with the fluff stripped out
- Expected experience
- 3+ yrs
- Management level
- Individual contributor
| Base salary | US$180,000 – US$260,000 / yr |
|---|---|
| Cash bonus | US$18,000 – US$26,000 |
| Total comp | US$198,000 – US$286,000 |
CertificationsPhD
Efficient Computer is rethinking computing from the ground up to solve one of AI's biggest challenges: energy. Our Fabric architecture delivers a 10–100x improvement in energy efficiency for general-purpose computation, including AI, while supporting familiar programming languages and software frameworks—unlocking new possibilities for autonomous machines, intelligent infrastructure, wearables, and space systems. With our first processor, Electron E1, now shipping in volume and more than $97 million in Series B financing recently announced, we're accelerating customer deployments and scaling our architecture to data center performance. Join us to build the hardware and software that bring intelligence wherever it's needed and help shape the next generation of computing.
Efficient is seeking a CAD Lead - PD flows/infrastructure to join our growing team. The ideal CAD Lead would have worked on significant portion of the full gamut of Physical Design flows and flow infrastructure (flowtracer etc). This role is in a newly formed hardware engineering group and is the seed hire for this discipline. You will get to setup CAD flows and infra from scratch and influence and shape this aspect in the future.
This is a unique opportunity to get in at the early stages of a hardware engineering organization and have influence on our products as we move from initial stages of product development to market release and scaled volume production. Join our team and help us shape the future of computing at the edge and beyond!
Key Responsibilities
- Drive and develop PD flows, methodology for state of the art finfet and multi patterning based technologies from scratch in Cadence Tempus or Synopsys Primetime.
- Help develop repeatable, predictable , design and process agnostic PD flows.
- Develop state of the art flow infrastructure to enable consistent and rapid design under tight schedule constraints for multiple product lines in the energy efficient edge AI computing market.
- Work closely with PD team leads to propose and develop end to end build and signoff flows.
- Build regression frameworks for ensuring high quality flows and achieve hardware engineering vision of spending 90% or more time on actual design tasks and NOT wrestling with tools.
- Develop collateral quality checking utils to ensure high design efficiency.
- Develop and deploy a unified environment for specifying all collaterals (stdcell, memory, PDK, hardips…) and all flow dependencies (cycle time, PVTRC corners, per flow design and process dependent configuration).
- Work with 3rd party vendor resources and coordinate their work.
- Continuously work on improving flow consistency and efficiency in the context of multiple product lines.