Principal Place and Route (PnR) Engineer

The role

You will develop and tune partitioning, placement, and routing algorithms that map customer workloads onto the RDU. You will work with compiler, hardware, and performance teams to model hardware constraints and analyze throughput gaps.

What you will do

• Develop partitioning, placement, and routing algorithms that meet hardware resource constraints and keep compile times practical
• Tune PnR results for target workloads, including LLM inference at different batch sizes and concurrency levels
• Model new hardware constraints and architecture features in our solvers and heuristics as the chip evolves
• Analyze compiled output with performance engineers and trace throughput gaps back to mapping decisions
• Build the infrastructure for prototyping, regression testing, and deployment of PnR changes
• Work with the compiler and hardware teams to define interfaces and resource models

Required qualifications

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field
• 3+ years of experience developing optimization or graph algorithms in industry or research
• Expert knowledge of graph algorithms, partitioning algorithms, combinatorial optimization, or MILP solvers
• Strong proficiency in C/C++
• Familiarity with Python
• Experience designing large, highly parallel, performance-sensitive systems
• Ability to learn hardware architecture and apply it to improve performance
• Experience solving NP-hard problems in practice with heuristics, approximation, or pruned exact methods

Nice to have

• Experience with place and route for FPGAs, CGRAs, or other spatial architectures
• Experience with ML compilers such as MLIR, LLVM, TVM, or XLA
• Experience with simulated annealing, constraint programming, or SAT/SMT solvers
• Familiarity with LLM inference stacks such as vLLM and PyTorch
• Publications at venues such as FPGA, DAC, ICCAD, or MLSys

Benefits

• Base salary plus equity
• 95% premium coverage for employee medical insurance
• 77% premium coverage for dependents
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with employer contribution
• Dental, Vision, Short/long term Disability, Basic Life, Voluntary Life, and AD&D insurance plans
• Flexible Spending Account (FSA) options like Health Care, Limited Purpose, and Dependent Care
• Full subscription to Headspace
• Gympass+ membership with access to physical gyms
• One Medical membership
• Counseling services with an Employee Assistance Program

Before you apply

• You must submit an application form for each position for which you believe you are qualified

About the company

SambaNova is a leader in next-generation AI infrastructure, delivering a full-stack inference platform for customers worldwide. Its core technology is the RDU (Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit).