# RTL Design Engineer, Hardware at River AI

- Company: River AI
- What the company does: Develop frontier language models and agents. Training, reinforcement learning, and inference in one system, on River Cloud or your own GPU cluster. Backed by General Catalyst.
- Company website: https://river.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Palo Alto, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $200K to $420K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-05-15
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/riverai/jobs/4250003009
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/river-ai-rtl-design-engineer-hardware/

## About the role

We are looking for exceptional RTL design engineers to architect and implement high-performance custom silicon. You will design and define the architecture, micro-architecture, and implementation of complex AI accelerator and related SoC components on advanced foundry nodes. You will take ownership of large parts of the chip and be responsible for both functionality and PPA.

## What they're looking for

- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering, and 5+ years practical industry experience working with advanced process nodes (7nm or below)
- Deep hands-on proficiency with industry-standard RTL, synthesis, physical design, and timing tools (e.g., System Verilog, VCS/Verdi, Fusion Compiler, PrimeTime)
- Expert knowledge in Computer Architecture of at least one style of chip, including SoCs, CPUs, GPUs, or AI accelerators
- Proven track record of functional and performant silicon delivery, including experience in ECOs and reliable silicon at scale
- A highly collaborative mindset to push boundaries and co-design effectively with other engineers
- Hands-on experience in post-Silicon bug fixing, firmware patching, and GPIO/I2C/SPI/UART low-level debugging

Tags: Personal AI Hardware