Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$150k/yr
Normal Computing | Build with Us Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and…
Skills: Thermodynamic hardware, Physics, Electrical engineering, Computer engineering, Machine learning
Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid
About Nu Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary tech…
Skills: Distributed systems, Blockchain, Backend engineering, System architecture, Transaction processing
Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid
About Nu Nu is the leading digital bank in Latin America, serving 135 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The company has been leading an industry transformation by leveraging data and proprietary tech…
Skills: Crypto infrastructure, Distributed systems, Blockchain integrations, DeFi, Custody
Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid
$160k–$220k/yr
Astrocade is an AI technology company building super-intelligence for the interactive world, delivered through a breakout consumer platform. Today's frontier models can write, reason, and generate video. None can build a…
Skills: React, TypeScript, Frontend architecture, A/B testing, Product analytics
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$233k–$325k/yr
Your opportunity to make a real impact and shape the future of financial services is waiting for you. Let’s push the boundaries of what's possible together. As a Senior Director of Software Engineering at JPMorganChase w…
Skills: Software engineering, Data management, Artificial intelligence, Distributed systems, Cloud computing
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
Cspeed IO is a stealth start up backed by Sutter Hill Ventures and Atreides Capital - headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. Our executive team has a demonstrated track record of building and scaling category-defining semicondu…
Skills: Semiconductor design infrastructure, EDA licensing operations, Identity management, SAML, SCIM
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$180k–$440k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: C, C++, Networking Protocols, Distributed Systems, Traffic Engineering
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$135k–$260k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: SQL, Java, Python, ETL, Kafka
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: RL Inference, Distributed Systems, LLM Inference, Python, C++
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$180k–$440k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Rust, C++, C, Kubernetes, Linux kernel
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$200k–$230k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: AI Law, Privacy Law, Data Protection, Content Regulation, Copyright Law
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$175k–$275k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Software engineering, AI/ML workflows, Annotation tools, Evals, Component libraries
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$43/hr–$62/hr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Child Safety, CSAM/CSE Identification, LLM Safety, Trust & Safety Operations, Risk Assessment
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$180k–$440k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: C++, Rust, GPU Kernels, Distributed Systems, Model Serving
Palo Alto, California, United States · Remote OK
$150k–$250k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Python, Go, TCP/IP, BGP, RDMA
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$125k–$400k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Python, Rust, Scala, Go, Java
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$180k–$440k/yr
SpaceXAI’s mission is to create AI systems that can accurately understand the universe and aid humanity in its pursuit of knowledge. Our team is small, highly motivated, and focused on engineering excellence. This organi…
Skills: Distributed systems, Python, Jax, Rust, C++
Mercari, Inc.Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid
$146k–$219k/yr
Mercari is Your Marketplace. We make it super easy to sell (or buy) almost anything. We all have things we don’t use, never used or simply outgrew. But that stuff still has value. Mercari gives you the power to simply se…
Skills: Data engineering, GCP, BigQuery, Dataform, Airflow
Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid
$188k–$200k/yr
About Typeface We help the world’s biggest brands move from brief to fully personalized campaigns — in days, not months. Founded by Abhay Parasnis and backed by Microsoft, GV, Salesforce, Lightspeed, Madrona and Menlo, w…
Skills: Backend development, Cloud platforms, AWS, Azure, GCP
Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site
$171k–$231k/yr
Amazon Conversational Search is the exciting new LLM-based feature in the Amazon App / Desktop to allow customers to engage with Amazon in natural language conversations. We are looking for a Senior Technical Program Man…
Skills: Technical program management, Software development, Cross-functional team leadership, Stakeholder management, LLM
Sign up with Clera and we'll reach out the moment a role actually fits you — no more spraying applications into the void.
Residents will work hands-on with thermodynamic hardware to design, simulate, and characterize unconventional computing systems. They are expected to drive original research, build evaluation frameworks, and co-author a research paper for presentation at a company colloquium.
Candidates should be pursuing or have recently completed a graduate degree in physics, engineering, computer science, or applied math. Strong Python skills and a deep interest in unconventional computing, device physics, and machine learning systems are required.
Normal is an applied AI company solving the hardest problems in AI and silicon. We build foundational hardware and software for the semiconductor industry, critical AI infrastructure, and the broader systems that power our world, in partnership with the world's most advanced institutions. We work as one team across New York City, Silicon Valley (Mountain View), London, Copenhagen, and Seoul.
The Thermodynamic Hardware Residency is Normal Computing's flagship program for exceptional researchers and engineers who want to work at the frontier of unconventional computing. Residents join a small, hand-picked cohort with a dedicated research mentor, direct access to the team building our cutting-edge thermodynamic hardware, and a clear arc from onboarding through publication.
Every residency is built around two milestones that mark you as part of something bigger than a single project: a research paper co-authored with our team, and a company-wide research colloquium where you present your findings to the full Normal Computing organization. You'll leave with a body of published, presented work, and a standing as one of the earliest residents to help define what this program becomes. Exceptional performers will be considered for full-time conversion at the end of the residency.
You'll spend your residency embedded with the team building and characterizing our unconventional, thermodynamic computing hardware — silicon that exploits physical noise and analog dynamics rather than fighting them.
This is a hands-on research residency: you'll take ownership of a real technical problem at the boundary of physics, hardware, and machine learning, work alongside the researchers and engineers building our hardware, and be expected to contribute ideas, not just execute someone else's.
Our hardware is designed to deliver orders-of-magnitude more AI inference per dollar, per watt than conventional GPUs — not by porting existing GPU kernels onto new chips, but by rethinking how core operations work when the substrate itself is stochastic analog computation in memory rather than conventional digital logic. That rethinking, from device physics up through algorithms, is exactly the kind of problem residents take on.
You'll get direct exposure to the pace, ambiguity, and speed of decision-making that comes with working at a fast-moving, well-funded hardware startup — where the distance between an idea on a whiteboard and a test on real silicon is measured in weeks, not years.
Work hands-on with thermodynamic hardware. Help design, simulate, characterize, or evaluate our hardware, where noise, analog dynamics, and in-memory computation are first-class design elements rather than sources of error to be engineered away.
Design numerical methods for a new substrate. Explore algorithms and numerical methods that exploit thermal noise and analog dynamics directly, rather than adapting techniques built for conventional digital hardware.
Drive a research question of your own. Partner with researchers and hardware engineers to scope, run, and iterate on an original technical investigation — from device- or circuit-level physics up to algorithms and workloads that map onto thermodynamic compute.
Build evaluation frameworks and benchmarks. Help build the tests and benchmarks that measure how algorithmic ideas actually perform on real hardware and in simulation, and feed what you learn about model workloads back into hardware design decisions.
Co-author a paper. Work with the team to write up your findings for submission to a relevant venue, with mentorship on framing, experiments, and technical writing along the way — one of the two milestones every resident builds toward.
Present at the residency colloquium. Share your work and thinking with the broader Normal Computing research community at the program's capstone event, and get real-time feedback from people building this technology every day.
Experience startup pace firsthand. Work directly with founders, senior researchers, and engineers in a lean, fast-moving environment where priorities shift quickly and your work has an outsized, visible impact.
Currently pursuing or recently completed a graduate degree (MS or PhD, or equivalent research experience) in physics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, applied math, or a related field — with a focus on hardware, device physics, stochastic or analog computing, or machine learning systems.
Comfortable moving between levels of abstraction: from the physics of noise and analog devices, to circuit- and architecture-level tradeoffs, to the algorithms and workloads that will eventually run on this hardware.
Some exposure to large-model inference concepts — attention mechanisms, KV caching, long-context decoding — and an interest in how they change when the underlying hardware isn't a GPU. Production-level experience isn't expected at the resident level, but the intuition should feel familiar.
Strong Python skills, plus comfort with (or eagerness to learn) a lower-level systems language such as C++ or Rust; hands-on experience with simulation, experimentation, or hardware characterization (e.g., SPICE, PyTorch, FPGA or ASIC tooling) is a plus.
First-principles reasoning about novel computational substrates: a genuine curiosity about unconventional computing, where exploiting thermal noise rather than suppressing it sounds more interesting than intimidating.
Strong written and verbal communication skills; prior experience writing up research (papers, theses, technical reports) is a plus, as is any experience presenting technical work to a live audience.
A bias toward ownership and self-direction: you're energized, not overwhelmed, by the ambiguity and speed of a small, fast-moving startup.
Equal Employment Opportunity Statement
Normal Computing is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status.
Accessibility Accommodations
Normal Computing is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please let us know at [email protected].
Privacy Notice
By submitting your application, you agree that Normal Computing may collect, use, and store your personal information for employment-related purposes in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
AI for our most pressing crises in silicon.
At Normal, we're rewriting AI foundations to advance the frontier of reasoning and reliability in the physical world. We are tackling problems across semiconductors and industrials with a mix of interdisciplinary approaches across the full stack: from probabilistic software infrastructure and algorithms to hardware and physics, enabling AI that can reason and understand its own limits. We understand that our technology is only as powerful as the people behind it. Every employee drives significant impact within our products, often working directly with customers and embedding across our tightly-knit team. Our team members are driven by curiosity and passion for solving some of the most challenging problems in the world of atoms. Normal was founded in 2022 by engineers and scientists that pioneered industry-leading Physics + ML tools for next-gen AI at Google Brain and Google X.
Offices: New York, NY, US · San Francisco, California, US · London, England, GB · Copenhagen, DK
Based on 729 listings with disclosed salaries, most software jobs in Palo Alto, CA pay between $120k–$275k per year. Individual offers vary with seniority, company size, and specialization.
There are currently 952 open software positions in Palo Alto, CA listed on Clera. New openings are added daily as companies post roles.
Companies currently hiring include Rivian, Amazon, Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, Ford Motor Company, JPMorganChase, among others. Browse the listings above to see every active employer.
Yes — 470 of the 952 open software positions offer remote or hybrid work (101 remote, 369 hybrid).
Each listing links directly to the employer's application page. Apply early — fresh listings get the most recruiter attention in the first two weeks.
