Member of Technical Staff - Formal Methods
Architect Labs· Machine Learning
Palo AltoFull-timePosted 3mo ago
About the role
Formal Methods-focused CTO/engineer role at Architect Labs building the formal foundations of the chip design flow, including specification language, IR, proof obligations, and solver integration for production-grade silicon.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement the formal specification language and intermediate representation that sits at the heart of our flow, across hardware specifications, testbench, assertions and RTL.
- Build the proof-obligation generator that emits checkable claims (entailment of assertions from spec, refinement of RTL from spec) and the toolchain that discharges them via SMT solvers, model checkers, and proof assistants as appropriate.
- Establish the soundness arguments and coverage-adequacy methodology that let us claim, with evidence, that our generated artifacts faithfully characterize the spec.
- Co-design with our verification methodology and ML research teams: your formal layer is the oracle the agent loop optimizes against, and the boundary between "provable" and "tested" is a decision you make and defend.
- Own the formal stack end-to-end: spec language, IR, proof obligations, solver integration, and the empirical evidence that the whole thing works on real blocks.
Qualifications
- PhD in Computer Science, EECS, or a closely related field, with a dissertation or equivalent body of work in formal methods applied to hardware or systems. Exceptional candidates with a BS/MS and a strong industrial track record in formal verification will be considered.
- Deep expertise in at least two of: temporal logic and model checking, SMT-based verification, refinement-based specification, or proof assistants applied to hardware/distributed/concurrent/low-level systems.
- Experience with formal frameworks or proof tools, such as TLA+, Lean, Coq, or similar.
- A demonstrated history of applying formal methods to a real artifact that shipped not only published proofs.
- Comfortable across the formal stack; experience with multiple tools and informing tool choice.
- Strong software engineering skills; ability to build the toolchain and integrate formal tools into automated pipelines.
- Fast-moving builder who can turn research-grade ideas into production components on a chip-design timeline.
Skills
Required:Formal methodsSpecification languages and IRProof tooling and integrationSoftware engineering for toolchainsHardware verification experience
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity stake
- Fast-paced startup with autonomy and visible impact
- A foundational role at the intersection of formal methods, AI, and silicon
Last updated Sep 20, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
About Architect Labs
Architect Labs
Architect is a frontier AI lab for chip design.
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