Rust Software Engineering Intern, Chip Design Tools - Winter

Fab2 · Internships & Co-ops

Pay: $114,000–$131,000
Where: Austin
Posted: Aug 28

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 and Jim Keller. 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.

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.

What you'd do

A game, engine, or real-time background: ECS, scene graphs, spatial indexing, physics engines, frame budgets, GUI, low-latency input.
Some EE, analog and digital. You don't need to be a chip designer.
Time lived inside deep, serious software, and opinions about it: Blender, Ableton, KiCad, CAD tools, DAWs, game engines.
Distributed or real-time systems: write-ahead logs, event sourcing, replication, CRDTs, OT, websockets. Data pipelines.
Geometry, graph, and routing algorithms; spatial data structures; optimization.
Familiarity with schema evolution and serialization formats like Protobuf, Flatbuffers, Cap’n Proto.
Graphics and visualization: turning big, complex datasets into something legible, fast, and even beautiful on screen. Custom rendering, shaders, GPU pipelines (WebGPU, Vulkan, OpenGL).
An interest in version control, not just using Git but how it works underneath.
Housing Stipend to help with first month expenses
Lunches daily, Dinners 3x per week, Stocked Office Kitchen with Snacks and Spindrifts

What they want

Strong Rust, or serious C++/systems experience and the obvious curiosity to go deep in Rust.
Solid systems fundamentals: memory, performance, concurrency. You profile before you optimize. You've taken something slow and made it fast, and you can tell us about why it was slow.
A track record of non-trivial software you built from scratch and can walk us through end to end. The weird side project, engine, or tool you wrote because the existing one annoyed you.