AI Engineering Lead

Normal Computing | Incredible Opportunities

The Normal Team builds foundational software and hardware that help move technology forward - supporting the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world. We work as one team across New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Seoul, and London.

Your Role in Our Mission:

As an AI Engineering Lead, you will lead a team of engineers building systems for AI-native EDA and advanced hardware workflows. This work sits at the intersection of applied AI, ML systems, agents, model evaluation, software engineering, and semiconductor domain complexity.

You will be responsible for setting technical direction, managing execution, developing engineers, and staying close to the implementation details that determine whether these systems work in practice. The team is building AI systems where correctness, traceability, and reliability matter, especially when agents are operating against formal or highly structured engineering problems.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who has grown from strong individual contribution into technical leadership or management. You should be comfortable moving between architecture, model behavior, evaluation, implementation tradeoffs, hiring, and team development.

The strongest candidates will have built meaningful AI systems in technical domains where models need to operate against real constraints. Experience with LLMs, model training and post-training, RL, agents, optimization, model evaluation, or applied AI/ML systems is especially relevant.

This direction maps well to the current internal work at Normal, including auto-formalizing systems for advanced hardware, scalable AI systems, ML efficiency, and AI applied to semiconductor and circuit design workflows.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage a team of AI engineers

• Set technical direction for applied AI and ML engineering work across Normal’s product and platform areas

• Stay hands-on with architecture, implementation decisions, code review, debugging, evaluation, and system design

• Build AI systems that can operate against structured engineering workflows, formal specifications, and objective correctness signals

• Partner with product, engineering, research, and leadership to translate ambiguous goals into clear technical plans

• Help define the operating rhythm, engineering standards, and execution model for the AI team

• Hire, mentor, and develop strong AI engineers as the team scales

• Identify technical risks early and guide the team toward practical, high-quality solutions

• Balance model quality, system reliability, product impact, and engineering velocity

• Contribute directly to critical technical work when needed, especially in early or ambiguous areas

What Makes You A Great Fit:

• Direct experience across AI engineering, applied AI, production ML systems, or closely related areas

• Experience as a technical lead, staff-level IC, engineering manager, or hybrid lead/manager for AI/ML engineering teams

• Track record of building and shipping meaningful AI systems in production or high-impact technical environments

• Strong hands-on technical ability, with comfort reviewing designs, debugging systems, and contributing directly when needed

• Experience working with LLMs, transformer architectures, post-training methods (SFT, RLHF, DPO, reward modeling), RL, agents, model evaluation, or inference systems

• Strong judgment around architecture, model behavior, evaluation, system tradeoffs, and execution priorities

• Ability to create clarity in ambiguous technical areas and help teams move quickly without losing rigor

• Experience managing or mentoring engineers while maintaining close technical involvement

• Experience partnering cross-functionally with product, research, infrastructure, and engineering leadership

• Strong ownership mindset and ability to operate in a small, high-caliber team

Bonus Points For:

• Experience applying agentic systems and AI to EDA, semiconductor workflows, circuits, hardware design, verification, or other advanced engineering domains

• Experience leading AI work in a startup, research-heavy, or zero-to-one product environment

• Experience hiring and scaling small, senior engineering teams

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.