Physical Design Team Lead

The role

You will lead physical design teams to take complex, high-speed mixed-signal and digital SoCs from RTL handoff through tapeout. You will set technical direction, drive execution across multiple projects, and grow engineers.

What you will do

• Lead and mentor physical design engineers
• Set priorities, assign work, and ensure high-quality, on-time delivery
• Drive physical design projects end to end including planning, scheduling, risk management, and status reporting
• Define and evolve physical design methodologies, flows, and best practices
• Own block-level and top-level implementation including floorplanning, placement, clock tree synthesis, routing, and optimization
• Drive timing closure, power integrity, and signal integrity
• Lead physical verification and sign-off activities including STA, IR/EM, DRC, LVS, and ECO management
• Partner with RTL design, DFT, analog, and architecture teams
• Work with foundry, EDA vendors, and IP providers
• Contribute to hiring, onboarding, and professional development of team members

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on experience in physical design of complex SoCs or ASICs
• Proven experience leading projects and technical teams through one or more full-chip tapeouts
• Deep expertise with industry-standard physical design and sign-off tools (e.g., Cadence Innovus, Synopsys Fusion Compiler/ICC2, PrimeTime, Calibre)
• Strong knowledge of timing closure, power/clock distribution, and physical verification in advanced process nodes
• Excellent communication skills
• Ability to work in a fully in-person, collaborative environment

Nice to have

• Experience with high-speed interface designs such as PCIe, Ethernet, or SerDes-based products
• Proficiency in scripting languages such as Tcl, Python, or Perl for flow automation
• Experience with hierarchical design, low-power methodologies, and ECO-driven closure
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and drive continuous improvement in team processes

About the company

Astera Labs provides rack-scale AI infrastructure through purpose-built connectivity solutions. The company's Intelligent Connectivity Platform integrates semiconductor-based technologies with the COSMOS software suite.