Founding Software Engineer

Generation Alpha Transistor is an early stage startup bringing AI to chip design. Founded this year by a team of UC Berkeley PhDs with deep expertise across software, semiconductors, ML and AI, and well-funded by silicon valley’s best investors and the US Chips Act. 

We’re in a silicon renaissance, fueled by demand for AI and the end of Moore’s Law. NVDA going to infinity is barely the start of the first inning. There’s only one problem: designing all those new chips. At nanometer scales this has grown exponentially more complex, costly, and laborious. GenAlpha brings the power of AI to automate their most painful bottlenecks. 

GenAlpha founding engineers will work in a dynamic & high-growth environment, directly with our founders and customers, including some of the world’s biggest & highest-impact semiconductor designers & fabs. Founding engineers can expect to do any & all of:

Full-Stack & AI

• Develop AI agents for novel chip design problems

• Experience with LLM-based systems & agents, LLM encodings, foundation models, ML systems, fine-tuning, RAG, GraphRAG all pluses

• Develop automated methods to extract structured data from diverse sources including documents & images

• Test & characterize natural language AI systems

• Requires proficiency with one or more of Python, TypeScript, C++, Rust

Front-End & Graphics & GUI

• Develop a high-performance web + desktop 2D graphical CAD environment

• Requires proficiency with one or more of JavaScript, TypeScript, Rust

• Experience with WebGL, WebGPU, or other graphics APIs highly desirable

• Experience with 2D graphics, computational geometry, game engines, graphics engines, high-performance rendering all pluses, especially in the context of CAD design systems 

• Knowledge of WebAssembly/ WASM & other high-performance performance frontend tactics highly desirable

• No web framework experience required. No React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Elm, none of that. None of the bolt-on tools such as Redux, MobX either. 

• Experience with high-performance/ binary serialization formats such as ProtoBuf, Capn Proto, FlatBuffers etc a plus 

Silicon EDA

• Develop novel tactics for silicon electronic design automation (EDA) 

• Focus on physical design of analog, RF, and custom circuits, e.g. memory, standard cells

• Optimizing placement, routing, extraction, simulation, physical verification (LVS, DRC)

• Knowledge of silicon design flow & typical chip data (LEF, DEF, GDS, Spice, etc) 

• Requires proficiency with one or more of C++, Rust

We do not expect you to know all those things! But the more the merrier. If any of these areas sounds like you - and especially if learning the others sounds like fun - please reach out. 

We value software generalists & polyglots who are unafraid to try & learn new & valuable tools, wherever they can be found. Past experience in cloud-native B2B and customer-facing engineering roles is a plus. Desire to grow into engineering leadership is a plus. Desire to work in a rapidly changing, early stage startup environment is a must.