Block is a company focused on accelerating the world's transition to an open economy through innovative products. They are seeking an ASIC Validation Engineer to bridge the gap between custom mining silicon design and real-world operation, working closely with designers and engineers to debug issues and build test infrastructure.
Responsibilities:
- Bring up new silicon on bench platforms, evaluation boards, and system hardware
- Debug issues across ASIC, board, firmware, and system interactions
- Develop bench tests, scripts, and tools to exercise silicon features and collect data
- Build and maintain test setups (lab automation, instrumentation, fixtures, scripts)
- Partner with ASIC designers to validate functionality and root-cause failures
- Work with system engineers to ensure silicon performs correctly in target system environments, including mining systems
- Generate and analyze data to support design decisions, characterization, and bring-up
- Create lightweight, reusable test workflows and documentation for the broader team
- Support early manufacturing efforts with practical validation and debug, as needed
- Travel up to 20% to the labs in Oakland, CA or Toronto, Canada
Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering or related field
- 4+ years of experience in silicon validation, hardware test, or related roles
- Strong hands-on experience in a lab environment (bench bring-up, debugging, instrumentation)
- Solid understanding of digital systems and basic analog concepts
- Experience writing scripts or tools (Python preferred) for test and data analysis
- Comfortable debugging issues that span multiple layers (ASIC ↔ board ↔ system)
- Clear communication skills and ability to work closely with cross-functional teams
- Bring up new silicon on bench platforms, evaluation boards, and system hardware
- Debug issues across ASIC, board, firmware, and system interactions
- Develop bench tests, scripts, and tools to exercise silicon features and collect data
- Build and maintain test setups (lab automation, instrumentation, fixtures, scripts)
- Partner with ASIC designers to validate functionality and root-cause failures
- Work with system engineers to ensure silicon performs correctly in target system environments, including mining systems
- Generate and analyze data to support design decisions, characterization, and bring-up
- Create lightweight, reusable test workflows and documentation for the broader team
- Support early manufacturing efforts with practical validation and debug, as needed
- Travel up to 20% to the labs in Oakland, CA or Toronto, Canada
- Experience with ASIC or FPGA bring-up and validation
- Familiarity with common interfaces (SPI, I2C, JTAG, UART, etc.)
- Experience using lab equipment (oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, power supplies, etc.)
- Exposure to high-performance, power-dense systems (e.g., mining ASICs, accelerators, or similar)
- Experience building test automation or internal tooling
- Familiarity with data analysis and visualization