Senior Verification Engineer
Fractile is building the silicon, systems and software to break through the memory wall, the fundamental hardware constraint standing between today's AI and what comes next.
The frontier of AI is no longer a research problem. The tasks AI can complete are doubling in complexity every six to seven months and the tokens required to complete them are scaling with it. Sequential reasoning, the kind that can't be parallelised away, means the internal clock speed of inference systems is the critical constraint. What stands between where we are today and the future potential of AI isn't smarter algorithms; it's the hardware to run them fast enough to matter.
Today's chips are hitting their wall. We're building the ones that don't.
Fractile is seeking to increase the clock speed of global progress, one chip at a time.
As a Silicon Verification Engineer, you will be reporting to the Director of Frontend Silicon, and will be based in either our Bristol or London office in the UK. We are looking for you to take an active role in building world-class ML/AI IC products for scale-out to data centre applications. You will be ambitious and have a proven track record in working in high-performance delivery organisations in the discipline of pre-silicon RTL verification.
We are looking for someone who is passionate about verification – not someone content to go through the motions, but rather looking to push the field further forwards. If you get excited about bringing software concepts to hardware workflows, and enjoy improving established practices to increase tape-out quality and bring down costs, then this is the role for you.
Our preferred candidate will be comfortable working alongside colleagues across the organisation from disciplines such as modelling, system architecture and RTL design. You’ll be frequently collaborating to ensure our RTL releases are of the highest functional quality, and that the entire company shares the same definition of a functionally correct product. This means contributing to discussions around specification, architecture and the workflows surrounding them. You’ll be a key contributor to our highly disruptive and ambitious product.
We look for engineers with the following mindset:
- Software mindset for solving hardware problems
- The desire to be in a high impact role in a small team
- A disrupter of the “status quo” of hardware development
- Eagerness to contribute to and improve working practices and help build connections between hardware and software teams
- Detail-focused, with rigour as the baseline for all work
- Humility, desire to learn
- Happy to be part of a fast-paced, open and collaborative environment
Required skills and experience:
- Pre-silicon RTL verification
- Verification planning and execution from specification
- Building testbenches
- Stimulus creation
- Functional modelling of hardware blocks
- Checker creation
- Coverage definition/closure
- Strong software skills
- Python preferred, other languages acceptable
- Understanding of digital hardware concepts
- Ability to read and debug RTL in SystemVerilog
- Familiarity with debugging waveforms
Desirable skills and experience:
- Transaction-Level Modelling
- Whether in UVM, SystemC or another methodology
- SystemVerilog Assertions (SVA)
- Software fluency in multiple languages
- Open source tools for silicon development
- Cocotb (used for all our testbench collateral), Verilator, Icarus Verilog
- Commercial EDA tools
- Formal verification
- Working in a monorepo environment alongside software
- Bazel is our chosen tool, familiarity is not expected
- Contributing to architecture discussions
How we work
- Ownership and execution: you will have full agency to drive your work forward
- Rapid iteration: we all work directly with top leadership to move from idea to hardware on ambitious timelines
- Full-stack engagement: hardware, software, silicon, and modelling teams all work closely together to create a product with generational impact
- Optimistic and pragmatic: we possess the will to win, and to do the hard work to get us there
- Team player mentality: the mission is bigger than any of us, and we have the curiosity and technical focus to see the best idea shipped
About us:
• Founded 2022, we're 100+ people across London and Bristol, in the heart of the UK's frontier AI ecosystem, and growing fast.
• We offer competitive salaries, meaningful equity, and standard company benefits.
• We believe the hardest problems get solved by the broadest range of minds. We actively encourage applications from underrepresented groups in hardware and software engineering.
• Hybrid working; 2-3 days in our London and Bristol offices.
Export controls:
Our work involves technologies subject to UK and international export control regulations. Certain roles may require additional eligibility checks to ensure compliance with applicable law. We'll be transparent about this throughout the hiring process.
