Place-and-route looked done. Then timing, IR drop, and congestion all reopened at signoff, and the contract is already signed. On ShawSilicon you read the category score before you read the resume: every physical design engineer in the pool has passed a structured 10-question technical interview in their specialization, scored category by category — conceptual depth, design, debugging, diagrams, adversarial debug — against a fixed pass floor, and stays invisible to you until they clear it. You see the breakdown across floorplanning, CTS, and signoff, 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).
Physical design engineers transform gate-level netlists into manufacturable chip layouts. They handle floorplanning, placement, clock tree synthesis, routing, and signoff — the final steps before a design goes to the foundry for fabrication.
Physical design requires deep understanding of semiconductor manufacturing constraints, parasitic effects, and multi-objective optimization. ShawSilicon's structured technical interview tests real PD skills: floorplanning strategies, CTS methodology, IR drop mitigation, and timing closure at advanced nodes.
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 Physical Design role with required skills, rate range, and timeline.
Step 2: ShawSilicon matches you with verified engineers who have passed the structured technical interview in Physical Design. You see the category-by-category score, not just a resume.
Step 3: You interview the shortlist and start the engagement.