Rust Software Engineering Intern, Chip Design Tools - Winter

About the role

About fab2

The fab2 team can build anything. We design all the hardware and software needed to make chips and we make the fabs, tools, and components ourselves.

We're looking for exceptional, hands-on people who can iterate to the limits of what's possible.

fab2 was founded by Sam Zeloof https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof and Jim Keller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer). Sam is best known for making chips in his garage, and Jim has been a leader in the semiconductor industry for the past 40 years.

About the Team

We are building the software that silicon chip designers should have had 20 years ago.

Designing a chip today means stitching together a pile of desktop software, much of it decades old. We have a lot of respect for those tools, but in many ways they are behind. They've carried the industry this far, but we see enormous room to do better. For example: real version control, real collaboration, and interfaces that give you intuition rather than requiring it. We've concluded that we must build a lot of it from scratch. Studio is a fast, browser-based, multiplayer platform for designing and assembling whole chips. Figma plus GitHub, for silicon. The primary goal is simple: a user should never have to install anything or leave our app to take a chip from idea to finished design. Schematic capture, physical layout, and simulation, all in one place, end to end.

Studio is one half of a bigger idea at Fab2: making chips should be fast. We build our own fab equipment for the same reason we build our own software, because the components for what we want don't exist yet. Studio is the design side of that, and we want to close the feedback loop between designing a chip and fabricating it, so the whole cycle gets faster instead of just one part. Your users include the chip and process engineers sitting near you, which means the feedback loop on your own work is short too.

It's a deep application, dozens of complex tools and the heft of Photoshop, but we want it to feel as intuitive and powerful as Figma. It's Rust across the stack, compiled to WebAssembly, with custom rendering with wgpu/WebGPU, one code path native and in the browser.

About the Role

Fullstack, Rust end-to-end, working on the application itself. You will own major features from design through shipping and touch the whole stack. These are some of the problems on the table right now:

- Deeply interactive, low-latency editing tools: drag a wire and watch it auto-route, place a block, measure, annotate, catch mistakes the instant they happen. Careful handling, some algorithms and computational geometry. We need to constantly fight to keep the tools simple.

- A document model that can be diffed and merged like source code and at the same time real-time collaborative. This is the foundation everything else sits on.

- The sync engine streaming edits between clients, so chip designers can work together without sending files back and forth. More like a game server than CRUD: eventual consistency, high bandwidth streaming, correctness. Whether the wire format decodes to owned data or stays zero-copy so it holds up when the design is very large is a decision you own.