Principal ASIC Design Engineer (6-month contract)

Principal ASIC Design Engineer – 6-Month Contract

Remote / Occasional Travel to Oxford HQ

We are looking for a highly skilled ASIC Layout Engineer to contribute to the development of advanced mixed-signal designs at Oxford Nanopore. This is an exciting opportunity to apply your expertise in 65nm / 40nm / 28nm technologies and Cadence Virtuoso in a role that combines technical challenge with real-world impact.

You’ll be working remotely, with occasional travel to our Oxford headquarters, collaborating closely with a talented team of engineers who are pushing boundaries in chip design.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Leading top-level and block-level layout for analog and digital blocks.
• Driving schematic-driven layout and constraint-based design.
• Managing chip-level floorplanning, power distribution, shielding, and device matching.
• Performing layout verification including DRC, LVS, ERC, and supporting PEX flows.
• Supporting chip-level integration and successful tape-out.
• Delivering full-custom layout of analog and mixed-signal IP blocks in Cadence Virtuoso.
• Partnering with circuit design engineers to ensure all layouts meet electrical, physical, and reliability requirements.

What We’re Looking For

Essential Experience & Skills

• 5+ years’ proven experience in layout techniques and physical verification flows.
• Strong CMOS background, ideally with deep sub-micron nodes.
• Extensive use of Cadence Virtuoso layout and verification tools (PVS preferred).
• Solid understanding of layout and manufacturing effects.
• Proactive communicator, able to highlight constraints, challenges, and improvements.
• Highly detail-oriented, adaptable, and able to thrive in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong communication and documentation skills.
• Self-motivated, comfortable working independently and as part of a distributed team.

Desirable

• Experience with large ASIC designs.
• Familiarity with layout automation (e.g. SKILL).

At Oxford Nanopore, you’ll join a collaborative, innovative environment where your expertise directly shapes the future of our technology.

We welcome applications from all qualified candidates and will assess every applicant based on their skills, experience, and ability to perform the role.

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Oxford Nanopore Technologies: Our goal is to bring the widest benefits to society through enabling the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology for faster, information rich, accessible and affordable molecular analysis. The first application is DNA/RNA sequencing, and the technology is in development for the analysis of other types of molecules including proteins. The technology is used to understand and characterise the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses, and whole environments. With a thriving culture of ambition and strong innovation goals, Oxford Nanopore is a UK headquartered company with global operations and customers in more than 125 countries.