Senior Software R&D Engineer, VLSI Physical Design
Company: NVIDIA
Location: Austin, TX 78717
Salary: $168,000 - $264,500 a year
Type: Full-time
Posted: 2026-03-22
About this role
NVIDIA's success builds on a foundation of industry leading hardware. We achieve distinction through extensive design optimization, including combining the best of external EDA with highly optimized, internal EDA tools. Our team develops these tools by fusing advances in parallel computing, machine learning, and specialized algorithms for VLSI design. We are seeking a Senior R&D Software Engineer with proven experience in multiple areas of VLSI Physical Design Algorithms (sizing, buffering, CTS, legalization, incremental place and route etc.). Understanding both software and hardware aspects is the key. Creativity and self-drive to explore and perfect fast, high-capacity software is required. If you like to work across many technical areas and see your successes directly realized in the world's best AI hardware, it does not get any better than this!
Developing software within a leading hardware company means getting to almost exclusively focus on the latest processes and most advanced designs. We're not bogged down by legacy support, niche roles, or convoluted approval processes. Our developers enjoy unusually high intellectual freedom and the ability to explore broad roles.
What you’ll be doing:
- Invent new optimization engines that fuse traditionally independent engines (e.g., co-optimization of legalization and sizing) with the objective of increasing chip frequency while minimizing power consumption across a suite of internal optimization tools. These tools already outperform the industry's alternatives in high capacity timing closure and will advance even further with your contributions.
- Improve algorithms (in C++) for gate-level sizing, buffering, useful clock skew, cell legalization, power minimization, ECO routing, and incremental parasitic extraction.
- As with any software engineering team, we do write a lot of code, but this is broader than a typical CAD or EDA role. Instead, we as a team own the whole process from discovery and invention of new...