Head of SoC Architecture

SBT is the exclusive executive recruiting firm for this confidential position.

This confidential startup company is developing next-gen compute silicon, designed to advance AI high-performance computing. Led by seasoned semiconductor and technology executives, the company is building highly scalable SoC products focused on delivering significant improvements in performance, efficiency, and system-level capability. This Head of SoC Architecture role offers the opportunity to contribute to foundational technology, influence product development from an early-stage, and help shape the future of advanced computing.

Role

Role

• Own the overall SoC and system architecture, establishing the technical vision across multiple silicon programs.
• Partner directly with the executive leadership team to translate business objectives, market requirements, and product strategy into actionable silicon roadmaps.
• Lead 0-to-1 architecture development, transforming early product concepts into system specifications, subsystem definitions, implementation plans, and long-term platform strategies.
• Drive architectural decisions and tradeoff analysis across performance, power, area, memory hierarchy, interconnect, scalability, programmability, and system cost.
• Establish clear hardware and software interfaces while ensuring alignment across compute, memory, I/O, security, power management, and other major SoC subsystems.
• Provide technical direction to CPU, SoC, RTL, verification, performance, software, physical design, and silicon validation teams throughout the complete development lifecycle.
• Guide programs from early architecture and performance modeling through implementation, tapeout, silicon bring-up, productization, and production readiness.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in SoC, CPU, accelerator, or system architecture, with demonstrated leadership of complex, high-performance silicon programs.
• Proven ownership of multiple chip development cycles from initial product definition and architecture through tapeout, bring-up, and production deployment.
• Deep understanding of SoC integration, compute subsystems, memory hierarchy, cache coherency, interconnects, I/O, power management, and hardware/software interfaces.
• Demonstrated ability to make system-level architectural tradeoffs across performance, power, area, cost, scalability, reliability, and time to market.
• Ability to provide hands-on technical leadership while building alignment across highly specialized engineering disciplines.