Fractile’s mission is to enable a new chapter in the AI revolution. We’re pioneering AI innovation where hardware and software join to create something extraordinary, unlocking the power of the world’s largest language models with speed increases of x100. Our team is rapidly expanding, and we're searching for visionary engineers, scientists, and thinkers who share our passion for pushing boundaries and redefining what's possible. If you're ready to join a dynamic group of innovators shaping AI's future, we want to hear from you!

We are seeking a highly skilled Senior/Principal Physical Design Engineer to contribute to our next-generation chip designs. As a Physical Design Engineer, you will be responsible for the end-to-end implementation of complex IC physical designs, from synthesis to sign-off, including opportunities for full-chip ownership. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including logic design, verification, and process technology, to optimise performance, power, and area (PPA) while ensuring design integrity and manufacturability.

Key Responsibilities:

• Drive the physical implementation of ASIC/SoC designs, including floorplanning, placement, clock tree synthesis (CTS), routing, and sign-off, with potential responsibility for full-chip execution.
• Work on synthesis, timing analysis (STA), and optimisation to achieve the best PPA metrics.
• Perform power planning and analysis, addressing IR drop, electromigration, and low-power design techniques.
• Ensure design rule check (DRC), layout vs. schematic (LVS), and other physical verification compliance.
• Collaborate with DFT engineers to integrate design-for-test (DFT) structures into the physical implementation.
• Develop flows in EDA tools such as Cadence Innovus, Synopsys Fusion Compiler, Mentor Graphics Calibre, and others.
• Interface with foundries and process engineers to ensure manufacturability and yield optimisation.
• Work closely with RTL and architecture teams to drive design feasibility, constraints, and physical-aware RTL design.
• Work with advanced AI tools and models to improve productivity, analysis, and design quality.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor’ Master’s or PhD in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
• 7+ years of experience in physical design for advanced technology nodes (e.g., 7nm, 5nm, or below).
• Strong proficiency in EDA tools for place & route, STA, and sign-off.
• Solid understanding of CMOS technology, semiconductor physics, and process limitations.
• Experience with low-power design methodologies, power optimisation techniques, and multi-power domain architectures.
• Expertise in timing closure, signal integrity, IR drop analysis, and formal verification.
• Proficiency in scripting languages like TCL, Perl, or Python for automation.
• Excellent problem-solving skills, communication, and teamwork in a collaborative design environment.
• Experience in high-performance computing (HPC), AI accelerators, or networking chips.
• Experience or strong interest in leveraging advanced AI tools and models within engineering workflows.

About Graphcore 

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.  

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.  

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.   

Graphcore’s teams are drawn from diverse backgrounds and bring a broad range of skills and perspectives. A melting pot of AI research specialists, silicon designers, software engineers and systems architects, Graphcore enjoys a culture of continuous learning and constant innovation.  

Job Summary  

Reporting to a Team Lead in the frameworks team you will play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, optimising, maintaining and supporting the software required to ensure the machine learning accelerators that Graphcore develop, enjoy first-class support in state-of-the-art machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and Triton.  

This role sees you joining our PyTorch team, where you will be part of a SCRUM team working on delivering new features, optimise performance, reviewing code changes, writing technical documentation, working with upstream communities, maintaining the code base and supporting users.  

In this role you will closely collaborate with other engineers, both within the PyTorch team as well as other engineering teams. You help the team coordinate and deliver complex, open-ended technical tasks. You are pro-active and an excellent communicator. You will develop deep expertise in the PyTorch project and will (in time) contribute to the team’s technical direction and processes. You understand the importance of managing code quality and code complexity and balancing this against the need to deliver business outcomes. 

Note that the job title and associated benefits will be tailored to the successful candidate’s level of experience at the job offer stage to one of Software Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, Principal Software Engineer or Senior Principal Software Engineer.  

Note that as the machine learning software landscape is quite fast moving and as such flexibility is essential – over time you may be asked to work on frameworks other than PyTorch. 

The Team 

The Frameworks team ensures Graphcore hardware works seamlessly with the tools that ML engineers and researchers love – Pytorch, Triton, Jax and TensorFlow. We’re a talented and diverse team of engineers and we foster a culture of collaboration, openness and learning. All our software teams follow agile working practices, and we care deeply about both ease-of-use as well as performance. We work closely work with other Graphcore teams as well as leading open-source communities. 

By joining us, you’ll join our exciting journey on the cutting edge of the machine learning industry. Your contributions will make a real difference – enabling machine learning engineers and researchers to unlock the full potential of Graphcore’s hardware.  

Responsibilities and Duties 

• Designing and implementing new features & maintaining and supporting existing features.
• Developing and maintaining unit tests, component tests and integration tests.
• Optimising the software stack to make it more performant for our users.
• Managing complex technical tasks with cross-team dependencies.
• Managing code quality, code complexity and technical debt.
• Provide technical leadership, contributing the team’s technical direction and processes.
• Contributing to documentation, including user manuals and tutorials.
• Conducting code reviews.
• Resolving regressions, performance issues and software defects.
• Coaching and mentoring other team members.
• Contributing to a collaborative team culture.
• Contribute to continuous improvements to improve ways of working.
• Working with upstream open-source development teams.

Candidate Profile 

Essential: 

• Demonstrable strong software engineering skills.
• Experience of Python development.
• Experience of developing performant C++ applications in a commercial setting.

At least one of:

• Experience of writing ML kernels.
• Experience of compiler development.
• Experience of using and/or development of ML Frameworks.
• Experience in a computationally intensive engineering field.

Desirable: 

• Demonstrable knowledge of AI/ML.
• Understanding of computing architectures.
• Experience of maintaining and supporting a complex code base.
• Experience in profiling / optimising high performance code.

Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

Applicants for this position must hold the right to work in the UK. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or support for visa applications

About Graphcore

At Graphcore, we’re building the future of AI compute.

We’re a team of semiconductor, software and AI experts, with deep experience in creating the complete AI compute stack - from silicon and software to infrastructure at datacenter scale.

As part of the SoftBank Group, backed by significant long-term investment, we are delivering key technology into the fast-growing SoftBank AI ecosystem.

To meet the vast and exciting AI opportunity, Graphcore is expanding its teams around the world.

We are bringing together the brightest minds to solve the toughest problems, in a place where everyone has the opportunity to make an impact on the company, our products and the future of artificial intelligence.

The Team:

The verification team sits within the Silicon design team and is responsible for ensuring that the RTL created by the logical design team and used by the physical design team matches the architecture specification for Graphcore silicon. The silicon verification engineer is responsible for verification activities within Graphcore, helping the team meet the company objectives for quality silicon delivery.

Responsibilities

• Verification planning, specification and closure of functional coverage
• Providing feedback to architects
• Test generation and failure diagnosis/triage
• Contributing to shared verification infrastructure
• Ensuring good communication between sites

Essential skills:
• Verification experience in relevant industry
• Proven leadership and planning skills
• Highly motivated, a self starter, and a team player
• Ability to work across teams and programming languages to find root causes of deep and complex issues
• Experience of the verification process applied in CPU and/or ASIC environments
• System Verilog, Python, C++, Linux

Desirable skills:
• UVM
• SVA
• Assembly languages
• LLVM, GCC
• DVCS e.g. Git
• SGE or other DRMS
• XML and XPath/XSLT
• Web programming – HTML/DOM, Javascript, SQL  

Benefits: 

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments  

We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences and are committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We are an equal opportunity employer and want to build a work environment where everyone is happy, productive and respectful so they can do their best work. If you have a disability or additional need that requires accommodation, just let us know. 

About Graphcore 

Graphcore is one of the world’s leading innovators in Artificial Intelligence compute.  

It is developing hardware, software and systems infrastructure that will unlock the next generation of AI breakthroughs and power the widespread adoption of AI solutions across every industry.  

As part of the SoftBank Group, Graphcore is a member of an elite family of companies responsible for some of the world’s most transformative technologies. Together, they share a bold vision: to enable Artificial Super Intelligence and ensure its benefits are accessible to everyone.   

Graphcore’s teams are drawn from diverse backgrounds and bring a broad range of skills and perspectives. A melting pot of AI research specialists, silicon designers, software engineers and systems architects, Graphcore enjoys a culture of continuous learning and constant innovation.  

Job Summary  

Reporting to a Team Lead in the frameworks team you will play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, optimising, maintaining and supporting the software required to ensure the machine learning accelerators that Graphcore develop enjoy first-class support in state-of-the-art machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and Triton (note: “Triton” here refers to the Triton language/compiler and not the inference framework).  

This role sees you joining our Triton team, where you will be part of a SCRUM team working on delivering new features, optimise performance, reviewing code changes, writing technical documentation, working with upstream communities, maintaining the code base and supporting users.  

In this role you will closely collaborate with other engineers, both within the Triton team as well as other engineering teams. You help the team coordinate and deliver complex, open-ended technical tasks. You are pro-active and an excellent communicator. You will develop deep expertise in the Triton project and will (in time) contribute to the team’s technical direction and processes. You understand the importance of managing code quality and code complexity and balancing this against the need to deliver business outcomes. 

Note that the job title and associated benefits will be tailored to the successful candidate’s level of experience at the job offer stage to one of Software Engineer, Staff Engineer, Senior Staff Engineer, Principal Software Engineer or Senior Principal Software Engineer. Note that as the machine learning software landscape is quite fast moving and as such flexibility is essential – over time you may be asked to work on teams other than Triton. 

The Team 

The Frameworks team ensures Graphcore hardware works seamlessly with the tools that ML engineers and researchers love – Pytorch, Triton, Jax and TensorFlow. We’re a talented and diverse team of engineers and we foster a culture of collaboration, openness and learning. All our software teams follow agile working practices, and we care deeply about both ease-of-use as well as performance. We work closely work with other Graphcore teams as well as leading open-source communities.  

By joining us, you’ll join our exciting journey on the cutting edge of the machine learning industry. Your contributions will make a real difference – enabling machine learning engineers and researchers to unlock the full potential of Graphcore’s hardware.  

Responsibilities and Duties 

• Designing and implementing new features & maintaining and supporting existing features.
• Developing and maintaining unit tests, component tests and integration tests.
• Optimising the software stack to make it more performant for our users.
• Managing complex technical tasks with cross-team dependencies.
• Managing code quality, code complexity and technical debt.
• Provide technical leadership, contributing the team’s technical direction and processes.
• Contributing to documentation, including user manuals and tutorials.
• Conducting code reviews.
• Resolving regressions, performance issues and software defects.
• Coaching and mentoring other team members.
• Contributing to a collaborative team culture.
• Contribute to continuous improvements to improve ways of working.
• Working with upstream open-source development teams. 

Candidate Profile 

Essential: 

• Demonstrable strong software engineering skills.
• Demonstrable experience of Python/C++ development.
• Demonstrable experience of compiler development. 

Desirable: 

• Experience with MLIR (or more generally: SSA-based IRs) is highly desirable. 
• Demonstrable knowledge of AI/ML.
• Understanding of computing architectures.
• Experience of maintaining and supporting a complex code base.
• Experience in profiling / optimising high performance code.
• Experience of writing ML kernels.
• Experience of using and/or development of ML Frameworks.
• Experience in a computationally intensive engineering field. 

Benefits

In addition to a competitive salary, Graphcore offers flexible working, a generous annual leave policy, private medical insurance and health cash plan, a dental plan, pension (matched up to 5%), life assurance and income protection. We have a generous parental leave policy and an employee assistance programme (which includes health, mental wellbeing, and bereavement support). We offer a range of healthy food and snacks at our central Bristol office and have our own barista bar! We welcome people of different backgrounds and experiences; we’re committed to building an inclusive work environment that makes Graphcore a great home for everyone. We offer an equal opportunity process and understand that there are visible and invisible differences in all of us. We can provide a flexible approach to interview and encourage you to chat to us if you require any reasonable adjustments.

Applicants for this position must hold the right to work in the UK. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or support for visa applications