VLSI early-career jobs

HireSetu has 52 published VLSI openings from 20 employers in the current sample.

What VLSI hiring looks like for candidates

VLSI hiring on HireSetu is selective: RTL, verification, physical design, and related semiconductor flows. HDL fluency and project evidence matter more than generic IT resumes.

VLSI hiring on HireSetu, read across employers

Written on 2026-09-11 from the 44 VLSI listings open then, across 22 employers; 52 are open today. It describes clusters and proportions rather than individual listings.

VLSI is the most concentrated field on HireSetu. Seventeen of the twenty-two employers are semiconductor companies by name — Qualcomm, Micron, AMD, Texas Instruments, Intel, Arm, NVIDIA, Broadcom, Silicon Labs, Microchip, SiFive, Infineon, Analog Devices, and the silicon teams at Google, Meta, IBM and Tesla — and the six largest hold more than half the listings between them. Three in four roles are at zero years. What a candidate cannot see from the list is that the field is not one field: the postings split into distinct sub-disciplines, and each sub-discipline has a city.

Which chip work, and where

Sub-discipline	Titles it appears under	Employers	Where
RTL and digital design	Design Engineer, Digital Design Engineer, ASIC Engineer – Design, IC Design Associate, DFX RTL Design, Silicon Engineer, Hardware Engineer, RTL Design Intern	Arm, Texas Instruments, Meta, Silicon Labs, AMD, Google, IBM, Microchip, SiFive, Infineon, Tesla	Split between Bengaluru and Hyderabad, with Microchip in Chennai
Physical design	Physical Design Engineer, Physical Design Layout Engineer, ASIC Physical Design	Qualcomm, Intel (two), Texas Instruments, Arm	Every one in Bengaluru
Verification and validation	ASIC Verification Engineer, Design Verification Engineer, CPU Post-Silicon Validation, DFT – ATPG, CPU Performance Associate	NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, AMD, Qualcomm	Hyderabad for NVIDIA, Bengaluru for the rest
Analog and memory circuit design	Analog Circuit Design Engineer, Memory Design Engineer, Memory Circuit Design	Intel, Arm, Broadcom	Bengaluru
Software on silicon	Compiler Development, RF Software, Camera Firmware, AI/ML Associate, Campus Hire Software, Firmware Developer, AI & Automation Engineer	Qualcomm (five of its nine), AMD, Micron	Mostly Hyderabad
Fab and manufacturing	Graduate Engineering Technician, Quality and Reliability Technician, IT MES Associate Engineer, Manufacturing Engineering	Micron, Analog Devices	Sanand and Gandhinagar, Gujarat

Bengaluru is physical design; Hyderabad is software on silicon

The city split is not incidental. Every physical-design listing in the sample is in Bengaluru — Intel's two ICE roles, Qualcomm's, Texas Instruments', Arm's — and so is every analog and memory-circuit role, which puts the back-end and circuit side of the industry in one city. Hyderabad's semiconductor listings lean the other way: Qualcomm's Hyderabad roles are compiler development, RF software, camera firmware and a campus software hire; AMD's Hyderabad roles are DFX RTL and firmware; NVIDIA's is verification; Silicon Labs' is IC design. A graduate who wants to do place-and-route or timing closure should be looking at Bengaluru; one who wants to write the software that runs on a modem or a camera pipeline should be looking at Hyderabad. The two cities are not interchangeable for this field the way they are for general software.

Qualcomm is a quarter of the list, and mostly not chip design

Qualcomm's nine listings are the largest single presence, but only one — the Bengaluru physical-design engineer, which asks for one to five years — is classic back-end silicon work. Five are software: a compiler developer, an RF software engineer for the 2024–26 batches, a camera firmware engineer, an AI/ML associate, and a 2027 campus software hire spanning three cities. The remaining three are a CPU performance associate, a systems internship and an untitled engineer posting. A candidate reading "Qualcomm, nine roles" as nine VLSI openings would be wrong by about eight; the company page has the full read.

The four AMD roles are all about proving silicon works

AMD's presence is small but unusually coherent, and the AMD write-up covers it in detail: none of its four listings is functional design. DFX RTL in Hyderabad builds the test and debug structures into a client SoC; DFT and ATPG in Bengaluru generates and verifies the patterns that catch manufacturing defects; CPU post-silicon validation debugs power and performance on physical Zen cores; the firmware role is safety-critical software for the adaptive-SoC line. Together with Texas Instruments' design-verification engineer and NVIDIA's ASIC verification engineer, it is the clearest evidence in the sample that verification and test are a hiring track in their own right, not a stage of design.

Micron in Gujarat is a different kind of VLSI job

Micron lists five roles and only one of them — an AI and automation engineer in Hyderabad — looks like the others in this field. Three are at the Sanand site in Gujarat: a graduate engineering technician, a product-quality and reliability technician, and an associate engineer for the manufacturing execution system. Analog Devices' manufacturing-engineering role in Gandhinagar sits in the same category. These are fab and assembly-plant positions, technician-graded, and they are the only listings in the sample where the work is making chips rather than designing them. For an electronics graduate outside the metro design centres they are a route into the industry that did not exist in India at this scale until recently, and they ask for a different preparation — process discipline and equipment familiarity rather than Verilog.

What the postings name

Verification is the single most-named skill, ahead of Verilog and RTL, which matches how many of the roles are test and validation rather than design. Python appears on nearly a fifth of the listings — scripting is expected across every sub-discipline here, not only the software ones. SoC, ASIC and debug follow. Two titles carry Staff — Broadcom's memory circuit designer and Infineon's design engineer — which is a senior grade regardless of the zero-years tag the listings carry, and Qualcomm's physical-design role asks for up to five years; the rest of the field is genuinely entry-level, with three in four postings at zero.

Reading the tag

Six listings carry VLSI without being semiconductor work: GE Vernova's two systems engineers are power-equipment roles, and an operational-risk associate at Ameriprise, a fraud-operations specialist at Citi, a knowledge analyst at Entrupy and a customer representative at TransUnion are not engineering at all. They carry the tag from the employer's portal category. Set them aside and the sample is thirty-eight listings from seventeen chip companies — small, concentrated, and split by city along the lines above.

Role titles appearing in VLSI (early-career heavy sample)

Design Engineer (2)
2026 Campus Hire
2026 Campus Hire – Associate Engineer, HW
2027 Campus Hire – System Engineer
2027 Campus Hire Associate Engineer, Software
Analog Circuit Design Engineer
ASIC Verification Engineer
Associate Engineer – AI/ML

Where VLSI openings are listed

Bengaluru (30)
Hyderabad (11)

Typical VLSI roles candidates research

RTL Design Engineer
Design Verification Engineer
Physical Design Engineer
DFT Engineer

Editorial guidance, not employer-confirmed titles.

Skills that often matter in VLSI

Digital design basics
HDL fluency
Verification methodology concepts
Scripting for automation

Employers hiring for VLSI on HireSetu

Qualcomm — 17 roles
Texas Instruments — 6 roles
Micron — 5 roles
Arm — 4 roles
AMD — 3 roles
Synopsys — 2 roles
Intel — 2 roles
Cadence — 1 role

Current VLSI openings on HireSetu

Related career areas

Electronics · Embedded · Software / IT

VLSI listings — accuracy and limits

Counts move between refreshes; the employer's posting is the source of truth. Disclaimer · Career Insights