Coverage looked fine on paper. Then test escapes showed up at the customer and test cost crept past budget. On ShawSilicon you read the category score before you read the resume: every DFT engineer in the pool has passed a structured 10-question technical interview in their specialization — scan insertion, ATPG, BIST, JTAG and boundary scan, scored category by category against a fixed pass floor — and stays invisible to you until they clear it. You see the breakdown across conceptual depth, design, debugging, diagrams and adversarial debug, then you decide.
Send one eligible role brief and get a verified shortlist within 72 hours, or a straight answer that the verified depth is not there yet. Either way, no charge for that shortlist. Eligible = a role in one of the nine specializations with a clear brief (stack, level, must-haves).
DFT engineers ensure that manufactured chips can be thoroughly tested on the production line. They insert scan chains, generate test patterns, implement BIST, and optimize test coverage to catch manufacturing defects before chips reach customers.
DFT is a specialized discipline that sits at the intersection of design and manufacturing. Engineers need deep understanding of both RTL architecture and semiconductor manufacturing defect mechanisms. ShawSilicon verifies DFT engineers with domain-specific questions on scan architecture, ATPG methodology, and test coverage optimization.
The same engineer designs the interview behind every specialization on ShawSilicon. It is built by John Bagshaw, a Senior FPGA Design Engineer with 8+ years designing for AMD, Intel, and Xilinx platforms — Zynq UltraScale+ and Agilex 7. The benchmarks behind the bar are public and timing-closed: cxl-kv-forge-qos at 400 MHz (WNS +0.413 ns, WHS +0.017 ns), a GNSS spoof/jam detector at 488.76 MHz, and flashattn-softmax and kvcache-compress both closed at 400 MHz. The fixed pass floor every engineer clears is the bar he holds himself to.
Step 1: Post your DFT role with required skills, rate range, and timeline.
Step 2: ShawSilicon matches you with verified engineers who have passed the structured technical interview in DFT / DFM. You see the category-by-category score, not just a resume.
Step 3: You interview the shortlist and start the engagement.