Hardware Engineer, Routing Silicon

We have designed our own forwarding silicon since 1988 and have not missed a tape-out in nineteen years. The current family is the seventh; the eighth is in RTL. You will own a block — likely lookup, scheduling or the counter plane — through to bring-up on a line card you will hold in your hand.

Responsibilities

• Own an RTL block from microarchitecture through timing closure, verification sign-off and silicon bring-up.
• Hit the tape-out date. The fabrication slot is contracted eighteen months ahead and is not moveable; scope moves instead.
• Design the counter plane to the observability specification supplied by Platform Defence. That specification is larger than the forwarding requirement and is not subject to trade-off.
• Support bring-up on the Kestrel Flats bench, including the third-shift window when the fab returns first silicon.
• Document the block to the standard that let us bring up a 2009 part in 2024 without its designer. That standard is why we can still do that.
• Review the external vendor parts we still buy, and say plainly when ours is worse.

Requirements

• Seven years in ASIC or high-end FPGA design, with at least two parts taken to volume.
• SystemVerilog, formal and constrained-random verification, and static timing at 7 nm or below.
• Packet-processing architecture: TCAM and algorithmic lookup, hierarchical schedulers, line-rate buffering.
• Willingness to work on-site at the bench. The parts do not leave Kestrel Flats and neither does the RTL.
• Tier 2 screening on offer.

Nice to have

• Optical interface experience at 800G and above.
• Experience designing for a single internal customer, where the requirement is specific, unchanging and unusually well informed.
• A tolerance for long horizons. The part you start is shipped by someone who has not been hired yet.

Process

1. Application read by the hiring manager, not by a filter. Five working days.
2. Screening call, 30 minutes, with the recruiter for the team named on the requisition.
3. Technical or desk conversation, 90 minutes, with two people you would work beside.
4. Site visit, half a day, at the facility named on the requisition. You will walk a hall.
5. Offer, with the band, the screening tier and the on-call obligation stated in writing.