Forward Deployed Engineer

Job description

NORMAL COMPUTING | BUILD WITH US Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world, in partnership with the world's most advanced institutions. We work as one team across New York City, San Francisco, London, Copenhagen, and Pangyo. THE ROLE The cost of taping out silicon is enormous, and the complexity of verification makes multiple tapeouts hard to avoid. Normal EDA accelerates this work as an AI platform for collaborative silicon engineering: a single source of truth across the chip lifecycle, learning continuously from the teams that use it. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you own our EDA system inside a customer's environment. Embedded directly with our partners, you adapt our platform to their data, workflows, and design challenges, working alongside our account executive and a deployment strategist to make the deployment a success. You thrive as a problem-solver and take pride in winning over customers along with the rest of your team. You will be debugging distributed systems, building new product features, post-training models, and working in various silicon-native languages such as SystemVerilog. Note that many different kinds of candidates could be well-qualified for this role, even with non-overlapping expertise (e.g. ML background vs. silicon background). WHAT YOU WILL OWN - Production Problem-Solving: Diagnose issues in our system, the model, the data, or the workflow. Work deep in both Normal's systems and the customer's environment to resolve them, and close the loop with their engineers. - Evaluation Against Reality: Design and run evals against real customer workflows, validating generated artifacts against their specifications so model behavior holds up in production. - Platform Integration: Integrate the platform with each customer's data, design flows, and tooling, working with their production codebases and against their existing infrastructure. - Customer Signal: Embedded with silicon design teams, translate their constraints into model and platform requirements, and carry that signal back to Normal's research, product, and platform teams to shape what gets built next. - Continual Learning: Post-train Normal's models on-prem on proprietary customer data and trajectories to customize to their workflow, tooling, and style preferences. Build the continual-learning loops that turn their engineers' feedback into system knowledge, so model quality compounds across the engagement. - Judgment Ahead of Playbook: Make the calls on what to build, what to skip, and when to push back on a request that would compromise what ships. Codify what works into patterns that raise the floor for every engagement after yours. WHAT MAKES YOU A GREAT FIT - Great at problem-solving and tracking down issues wherever they are in the stack - Strong software engineering fundamentals: proficient in Python, comfortable in production codebases, distributed-systems literate - Hands-on experience with the modern ML stack: prompt engineering, fine-tuning, evals, agentic patterns, model deployment - Willingness and ability to go deep on semiconductor verification workflows. You will spend significant time inside UVM testbenches, SystemVerilog codebases, and design specifications. Prior experience is a strong advantage, but what matters is whether you can build fluency fast and earn credibility with verification engineers - An ability to ship ML systems inside customer or production environments where model behavior had to hold up against real-world data - Calm in ambiguity: you make good decisions with incomplete information, and you know when to act and when to ask - Comfortable with travel when needed; anywhere between a few days for customer meetings and a few months for longer-term customer projects BONUS POINTS - Direct experience with EDA, semiconductor design flows, verification workflows (UVM, SystemVerilog, coverage-driven verification), or other areas of silicon engineering - Built or led an FDE or customer-deployment function from the ground up at an earlier-stage company - Open-source contributions or publications in AI or ML venues 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. Privacy Notice By submitting your application, you agree that Normal Computing may collect, use, and store your personal information for employment-related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.