Principal Compute Architect

About the Company

Foundation is developing the future of general purpose robotics with the goal to address the labor shortage. Our mission is to create advanced robots that can operate in complex environments, reducing human risk in conflict zones and enhancing efficiency in labor-intensive industries.

Responsibilities

• Lead structured evaluation of technical and business feasibility for a custom inference chip tailored to robotic workloads
• Analyze current bottlenecks in robotic inference pipelines and compare off-the-shelf vs. custom alternatives
• Develop models for performance, cost, scalability, power, and area to inform build-vs-buy decisions
• Define high-level chip architecture optimized for low-latency, real-time systems
• Evaluate tradeoffs in dataflow, memory hierarchy, interconnects, and hardware/software interfaces
• Guide RTL prototyping, simulation, and early design exploration
• Coordinate with external vendors, foundries, or design houses
• Deliver comprehensive reports with technical/financial analysis and risk/benefit tradeoffs
• Present findings to leadership and lead early custom IC design and project planning

Requirements

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in digital IC design, SoC architecture, or ASIC/FPGA development
• Proven track record in designing or evaluating AI accelerators or neural network inference engines
• Deep expertise in hardware/software co-design and embedded compute tradeoffs
• Hands-on experience with RTL design (Verilog/VHDL/SystemVerilog), simulation, and synthesis tools
• Ability to model and evaluate AI inference workloads
• Experience in robotics, autonomous systems, or edge computing
• Familiarity with low-power design, mixed-signal integration, and chip bring-up
• Experience collaborating with foundries or ASIC vendors