Ricursive at ICCAD 2026 — Introduce Yourself

Ricursive Intelligence is a frontier AI lab building self-improving systems, starting with chip design. We are reinventing chip development and closing the loop between AI and the hardware that fuels it, recursively accelerating the path to artificial superintelligence. Backed by $335M from Sequoia, Lightspeed, DST, and NVIDIA Ventures, we are a growing, fast-paced team where every hire shapes the work.
The company has unmatched talent density, including IMO, IPhO, and IOAA gold medalists, pioneers who made prior breakthroughs in chip design: AlphaChip (Nature 2021), ePlace (DAC Best Paper Nominee 2014), RL-CCD (DAC Best Paper 2023), INSTA (DAC Best Paper 2025), and C3PO (ASP-DAC Best Paper 2026), chip leads for Apple Silicon (multiple generations of iPhone and iPad) and Google (TPU, OpenTitan), and top researchers and engineers from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Stanford, and MIT.

We met you at ICCAD 2026, or you found us there. Either way, we’d like to keep the conversation going. This posting isn’t for a single role. It’s the best way to reach us if you stopped by our desk at the job fair, heard our intro on stage, or want to explore what working here would look like. Send us your resume and tell us where your interest sits, and we’ll make sure it reaches the right people.
Many of the problems we work on will look familiar from the ICCAD program: synthesis, placement, routing, timing, and sign-off, approached with machine learning at scale. Everyone here is hands-on. You’ll design algorithms, run large-scale experiments, and ship work that changes how chips get designed.

Areas we’re hiring across:
Chip design algorithms across synthesis, placement, routing, timing, and sign-off

Machine learning and reinforcement learning for chip design

LLMs and agents for chip design, including RTL generation and verification

Design verification and RTL design

These are the areas we’re hiring across today. If your work sits somewhere nearby, tell us where. We’re hiring for both full-time roles and internships. Whether you’re finishing a PhD, presenting your first paper, or already building tools in industry, we’d like to hear from you. When you apply, add a line about what you’re working on, such as a paper, a thesis topic, or an ICCAD or ISPD contest entry, so we can route you to the right person. The team works on-site in Palo Alto.