Silicon Architect (Diffusion ASICs)

Location: New York City; London

Employment Type: Full time

Location Type: On-site

Department: Hardware

Compensation: $234,001 – $298,252 • Offers Equity

We are committed to competitive and equitable compensation based on role, skills, and experience. Salary ranges are guidelines, with final compensation varying by role, experience, and location and reviewed regularly for fairness.

The Normal Team builds foundational software and hardware that help move technology forward, supporting the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world. We work as one team across New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Seoul, and London.

Your Role in Our Mission:

Look at the AI accelerator roadmaps coming out of every major silicon company right now and you will notice something strange: they are all building the same chip. Bigger systolic arrays. More HBM. More of the same architecture, scaled harder. The industry has placed a collective bet that the way to win the next decade of AI inference is to refine the GPU paradigm until it cannot be refined any further. We know that bet is wrong. Normal is building ASICs purpose-built for image and video diffusion inference, grounded in the physics of computation rather than the assumptions everyone else has inherited. The compute substrate has to be invented, not specified, and we are looking for the person who wants to help invent it.

You will work directly alongside our lead architect and research engineers, contributing across the full architecture stack: compute core microarchitecture, memory subsystem, interconnect, and the FPGA prototyping that proves the decisions before silicon. The team is small. The scope is wide. The architecture is being shaped now, not refined, and your contributions will be visible in the chip when it tapes out. If the appeal of working on a chip that has to be invented is greater to you than iterating on one that already exists, keep reading.

Responsibilities:

• Help define the architecture and microarchitecture of novel AI accelerator compute blocks.
• PE array design, datapath organization, and support for efficiency techniques such as sparsity exploitation and reduced-precision computation.
• Translate workload analysis and research findings into hardware specifications.
• Identify where architectural innovation creates the most leverage, define the structures that realize it, and produce microarchitecture documents unambiguous enough for RTL engineers to implement against.
• Work closely with RTL engineers through implementation.
• Reason across the full stack and defend PPA tradeoffs at every level.
• Make the call when the data is incomplete, and articulate why under scrutiny from the lead architect and the research team.
• Partner with the compiler lead on ISA co-design.
• Own the FPGA prototyping work.
• Stay current with the AI accelerator research landscape and articulate clearly where Normal's approach differs from existing solutions and why that matters.

What We're Looking For:

• A degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent work experience.
• Substantial experience in architecture or microarchitecture of high-performance digital systems.
• Fluency moving between algorithm-level analysis and hardware specification.
• Experience with simulation-driven architecture.
• Familiarity with quantization and reduced-precision approaches for inference and their implementation implications.
• Experience writing microarchitecture specifications and working closely with RTL engineers through implementation.
• Proficiency in Python or C++ for performance modeling and analysis, and familiarity with SystemVerilog or equivalent RTL.
• Comfort operating in an environment where the architecture is actively being discovered alongside the work.

Mindset and Impact:

This role is not for everyone. You will spend years on a chip that does not exist yet, defending decisions that cannot be fully validated until silicon comes back, on a bet most of the industry has not made. The people who thrive here run toward the hard stuff. They are steady in ambiguity, comfortable when the data is incomplete, and they take the hardest problem on the board first because that is where the answer is hiding. They are not waiting for the architecture to be handed to them. They want to be the ones who define it.

If you have spent your career suspecting you are one of those people, this is where you find out. The chip you help build will be the silicon behind a generation of image and video AI — the work people watch, the work people create with, the work that shapes what the next decade of visual computing looks like.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement: Normal Computing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status.

Accessibility Accommodations: Normal Computing is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let us know at accommodations@normalcomputing.com.

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